What makes Cassini-Huygens special?
Cassini-Huygens is an international collaboration between three space agencies. The Cassini orbiter that will orbit Saturn and its moons for four years, and the Huygens probe that will dive into the murky atmosphere of Titan and land on its surface. Huygens will be the first probe to land on a world in the outer Solar System – on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The sophisticated instruments on board both Cassini and Huygens will provide scientists with vital data to help understand this mysterious, vast region. The Huygens instruments will make detailed on-the-spot measurements of Titan’s atmospheric, looking at its structure, composition and dynamics. Images and other remote-sensing measurements of the surface of Titan will also be made during the descent. Preserved in the deep freeze of Titan’s atmosphere are chemical, carbon-rich compounds thought to be similar to those of Earth’s primeval soup. The in situ results from Huygens, combined with Cassini’s global observatio
