In 2005 a European probe named Huygens made the most distant landing in history, settling onto a frozen, methane-carved plain on Saturn’s moon Titan — and then lost half of everything it saw, because the command to switch on its backup radio channel was never loaded, and no one was listening.

In 2005 a European probe named Huygens made the most distant landing in history, settling onto a frozen, methane-carved plain on Saturn’s moon Titan — and then lost half of everything it saw, because the command to switch on its backup radio channel was never loaded, and no one was listening.

In January 2005, a European-built probe named Huygens parachuted through the thick orange haze of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and settled onto a frozen plain scattered with rounded ice pebbles, more than a billion kilometers from Earth. It remains the most distant landing humanity has ever made, and the only time any spacecraft has touched the surface of a world in the outer solar system. More than twenty years later, nothing has come close to…