Europe Trumpets Successes on Mars and Titan

摘要

Paris—Less than a week before it has to persuade European governments to approve its budget for the next several years, the European Space Agency (ESA) has been parading some of its achievements in 2005. These include the first batch of published results from the Huygens probe to Saturn's enigmatic satellite Titan (the most distant landing ever accomplished) and tantalizing glimpses of underground water from the Mars Express mission's ground-penetrating radar—the first subsurface view of another world. 'There have been many nail-biting moments, but 2005 has been a great year for European space science,' says ESA science director David Southwood.