In order to examine one of the last large secrets of our solar system, European Space Agency (ESA) constructed the probe called Huygens. It was put on the Cassini cosmic probe. The purpose of its mission was to unmask Titan – the biggest moon around Saturn. Exploring his surface is a part of the Cassini / Huygens mission, a common project undertaken by NASA and ESA. According to the plans of authors of this mission, the probe reached the orbit of Saturn in July 2004 and in January 2005 Huygens was dropped into the atmosphere of Titan.
“Cassini was created in the image and likeness of a human being. A system of antennae is like its ‘ears’ that will hear the signals from Earth and answer them. Onboard computers make up the ‘brain’ of the probe, which controls all the actions. Cameras, in turn, ‘see’ everything in the visual field. Cassini has also some kind of ‘legs’ in the form of additional jet engines to keep it along appropriate trajectory. It has also ‘hands’ to grasp and analyse the interplanetary dust and an 11-metre long arm to explore the magnetic field of the planet. The probe ‘feeds’ on nuclear fuel and it also must feed its ‘baby’, the Huygens module which task is to approach the surface of Titan as the point of destination of this ambitious mission...” Imagine that you jump on the parachute onto the surface of the Titan. Before you disappear in the orange fog surrounding this unusual world, you will see an uncanny view of rings of the Saturn. Perhaps you will manage to land on a sea full of methane and feel the fragrance of the atmosphere like in the centre of the refinery. It is probably the last thing you will manage to experience and to share impressions with someone on the Earth, because after few moments you will run out of oxygen and you will freeze to death. It sounds not very optimistically, doesn’t it? Therefore, at similar missions we use the robots. However, this history is not a script of the new science fiction film. Such a fate happened to Huygens – a small probe put on the cosmic Cassini probe. watch the fascinating journey of the most expensive space probe in the history of humankind see the world of Saturn, the most beautiful planet in the solar system plunge into the foggy atmosphere of its moon – Titan listen to the sounds of the outer space converted into the human hearing The show in the Planetarium will cause that you will feel as if you were there... The programme “Saturn Mission” is a kind of report about the course of the Cassini / Huygens mission, during which we will learn how to steer the cosmic probe far from the Earth and how to use different devices put on it. Our aim is to search the unknown worlds of the Saturn, its moon Titan and many other satellites of the planets with rings.
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