Huygens: 'Ground truth' from an alien moon—2005 historic descent to Titan revisited
Wednesday, January 11, 2017 - 18:31
in Astronomy & Space
After a two-and-a-half-hour descent, the metallic, saucer-shaped spacecraft came to rest with a thud on a dark floodplain covered in cobbles of water ice, in temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing. The alien probe worked frantically to collect and transmit images and data about its environs—in mere minutes its mothership would drop below the local horizon, cutting off its link to the home world and silencing its voice forever.