Thursday, April 4, 2013

Titan - A Place Like Home

Investigation of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, after the Cassini spacecraft's seven-year trek landed the Huygens Probe on its surface. Does it reveal how life on Earth began?

Over a billion kilometres away, Saturn's largest moon, Titan, holds tantalising clues to how life began here on Earth. In the most ambitious and expensive interplanetary space mission of all time, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft made a seven-year trek across the Solar System to attempt first contact with the Earth-like moon of Titan by landing a probe on its unseen surface. The first close up images of Saturn and its many moons were taken in the early 1980s by the Voyager One Deep Space Probe. One moon stood out from all the rest, the mysterious moon of Titan. Unlike any moon that had ever been seen, it had a thick almost Earth-like atmosphere. It was also shrouded in a thick orange haze which prevented Voyager from seeing down to the moon's surface. Scientists knew they had to go back.



Related Links:
The Planets
The Universe (season 1)

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