Discovery of Titatn
MAR 25, 2015
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.030928
On this day in 1655 Christiaan Huygens discovered Saturn’s largest moon Titan. Three hundred and fifty years later, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft released ESA’s Huygens probe to descend through Titan’s atmosphere and land on its surface. The feat was mankind’s first landing on a celestial body beyond the Asteroid Belt. The temperature around the landing site was 94 K and the pressure 1.5 (Earth) atmospheres. At the time and location of Huygens’s landing, the solar illumination on the moon’s surface was at roughly the level you’d find on Earth 10 minutes after sunset.
Date in History: 25 March 1655
© 2015 American Institute of Physics
