Titan
 


NASA IMAGE:

Fast Facts:

  • Titan has a thick atmosphere of mostly nitrogen and methane
  • Cassini spacecraft has flown past launching a probe called Huygens
  • Huygens probe has arrived
     

 

first color image of Titan

Image credit: ESA/NASA/Univ. of Arizona

This image was returned, January 14, 2005, by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe during its successful descent to land on Titan. This is the coloured view, following processing to add reflection spectra data, and gives a indication of the actual colour of the surface.

Throughout the Cassini mission, the spacecraft will send more than 300 gigabytes of scientific data back to Earth, which is more than 400 CD-ROMs of information! This data will be examined by more than 250 scientists around the world.