The Ambitious Plan to Fly a Drone Over Saturn’s Moon
NASA has approved funding for a mission to Titan, one of the best candidates for life in the solar system.
Hundreds of millions of miles away, in the orbit of Saturn, on the surface of Titan, the planet’s largest moon, rests a piece of human-made technology. Huygens, a nine-foot-wide, saucer-shaped probe, was dropped by the passing Cassini spacecraft and parachuted down to the surface in 2005. For a precious 72 minutes after it landed, Huygens transmitted data back to Earth, including image after image of its surroundings. There they were—gullies, the kind that on Earth are etched into rocky terrain by flowing water. Scientists
