Humans May One Day Fly Through Titan's Skies and Harvest Oxygen From Its Ice

Humans May One Day Fly Through Titan's Skies and Harvest Oxygen From Its Ice

Learn how Titan’s thick atmosphere, methane seas, and icy crust could support future explorers beyond Mars.

The Huygens probe detached from Cassini in December 2004 and spent 22 days coasting silently toward Titan before parachuting through an orange methane haze for two and a half hours, and when it thumped down on a plain of ice pebbles it kept transmitting for 90 more minutes from a moon nobody had ever seen the surface of

On 14 January 2005, a wok-shaped probe about 2.7 metres across drifted down through the orange smog of Titan on a parachute, took pictures of a shoreline that had never been photographed, and landed on a plain of rounded ice pebbles that looked, unnervingly, like a dry riverbed on Earth. It kept talking for another 90 minutes from the surface. The Huygens probe remains the most distant landing humans have ever pulled off, and it happened on a mo…