MISSIONS TO TITAN

Titan isn’t exactly nearby. When

Earth and Saturn are closest to each other they are still 1.2 billion kilometres (746 million miles) apart. This means visits to Titan in the past have been few and far between. The first probe to visit the Saturnian system was NASA’s Pioneer 11 in 1979, followed by Voyager 1 and 2 in 1980 and 1981 respectively. NASA’s Voyager spacecraft were pivotal in making initial measurements of its physical properties, such as mass, density, composition and so on. These observations caught the attention of many researchers because of their irregularity.

The best spy sent to the Saturnian system – and in particular Titan – was the Cassini spacecraft and its accompanying Huygens lander. CassiniHuygens arrived at Saturn in July 2004 and made many observations of the moon before Huygens was released with the intention to burst through the hazy atmosphere of Titan and land on its surface. On 14 January 2005, Huygens made its successful descent onto Titan before its batteries died and communication with Cassini ceased. All observations of Titan after the fact were made by Cassini before it ended its mission by crashing into Saturn’s atmosphere in September 2017. The data collected by Cassini is still providing new discoveries over five years after the mission’s end.

There have been talks of sending more probes to the exciting moon using new and innovative technology. One such proposal is the Dragonfly lander, part of NASA’s New Frontiers program. The Dragonfly lander will not just sit on the surface like Huygens, it will be a dual-quadcopter drone capable of moving around Titan’s thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere. This would allow astronomers to get a closer look at different surface features and would allow more freedom in movement than a rover.