Titan's first visitor nears touchdown

摘要

After seven years riding piggyback on NASA's Cassini spacecraft, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe is due to become the first craft from Earth to arrive on an alien moon. On 14 January the probe, which separated from Cassini on Christmas day, will float down through the thick atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan and land on its mysterious surface. The Huygens team hopes to discover what this world is made of and gain some insight into how life began on Earth. Attempting to land on other worlds is risky, as ESA's Beagle 2 mission to Mars showed a year ago. But Huygens's work will begin before it lands: in fact, it will complete most of its goals while parachuting down to the surface. Even so it will have to survive a number of perilous moments.