For unknown reasons, it took NASA specialists 12 years to unveil a strikingly beautiful video of Titan's surface photographs, in which the similarity of Saturn's satellite to Earth is obvious.
It was 12 years ago, in 2005, that the Huygens probe landed on Titan – an amazing world with rains and lakes. The small spacecraft parachuted through a thick layer of extraterrestrial haze and drifted down to land. The probe punched a small hole in the ice edge, jumped from the impact, made a slide, wobbled, and only after that the landing was completed.
On January 14, 2005, the European Space Agency's (ESA) 'Huygens' probe became the first exploratory robot to touch the surface of this orange moon and took the first detailed images of the surface. For an hour, there was an active collection of information after which the batteries of the probe sat down, and its mother ship, the Cassini spacecraft, disappeared over the horizon.
Nevertheless, during the descent to the surface and some time spent on it, the probe managed to collect enough data to get an idea of the alien world, which deceptively resembles the Earth in its surface structure.
The descent and landing of the Huygens is for us the largest scientific breakthrough in Titan research. It is also the first soft landing on an alien satellite, ”said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist. “It completely changed our understanding of this hazy world.”
