PixabayFew of us will ever get the chance to travel to space or discover another planet.
But now you can follow the journey of a probe landing on Titan, the planet Saturn’s moon, thanks to this footage from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology.
The animation uses actual images taken by the Huygens probe during its two-and-a-half hour descent to Titan.
Wikimedia/Kevin GillIn 2005, the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe fell to the surface of Saturn’s hazy moon, Titan.
Huygens’ landing was record-breaking. Carried to Saturn by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, it successfully parachuted down onto the planet’s moon.
It landed on a point further from Earth than had ever been landed on before and it is still the only landing on a body in the outer solar system in history.
NASAThanks to a new video released by NASA, you can relive the Huygens’ descent to Titan’s surface 12 years after it actually touched down.
The video utilises the photographs Cassini has sent back to Earth of Saturn’s liquid lakes of methane and sand dune landscapes.
Linda Spilker, a Cassini project scientist said, ‘It completely changed our understanding of this haze-covered ocean world’.
Huygens was a signature achievement of the international Cassini-Huygens mission, which will conclude in September 2017, when Cassini plunges into Saturn’s atmosphere.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.