Landing on Titan
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2021
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The story of the remarkable mission to land on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. The large mysterious moon has a thick orange atmosphere. No-one had ever seen the surface. In the late 1990s, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft was sent on a 7 year, 3.5 billion km journey through space to explore Saturn and Titan. Alex Last spoke to Prof. Emeritus John Zarnecki of the Open University who worked on the mission.
Photo: A flattened (Mercator) projection of the Huygens probe's view of Titan. Taken by the Huygens probe on 14th January 2005 (ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
| 0:06.8 | searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the |
| 0:11.8 | telly we share what we've been watching |
| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. |
| 0:29.2 | Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex |
| 0:38.3 | Last and today a story of space exploration from the early 2000s as we hear from one of those |
| 0:45.8 | involved in the remarkable mission to land a spacecraft on Titan one of the moons |
| 0:51.6 | of Saturn. |
| 0:53.0 | 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and lift off of the Cassini Spacecraft on million-mile trek to Saturn. |
| 1:04.0 | In 1997, the Cassini-Hawigan spacecraft was launched on a seven-year journey to Saturn in the outer solar system. |
| 1:16.0 | Kucini Huygens was a joint mission between the US Space Agency, NASA and ESA European Space Agency. |
| 1:26.7 | It was one of the most ambitious missions of space exploration, at least for unmanned space exploration you know we traveled to a place |
| 1:36.6 | about one and a half billion kilometers away this was the first time that we planned to send a spacecraft that will go into orbit around Saturn |
| 1:47.0 | and specifically to explore one of its moons the mysterious Titan. |
| 1:53.4 | Professor John Zarnicki of the Open University in the UK |
| 1:57.2 | was involved in the mission from the start. |
| 1:59.6 | He led a team which worked on the probe named Huygans, which would eventually detach from the |
| 2:05.2 | Cassini spacecraft and would attempt to land on Titan. |
... |
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