Digital Journal — The executives and scientists of the European Space Agency had every right to feel a little arrogant that Friday in January 2005, when their Huygens spacecraft became the first in history to touch down on a moon other than Earth’s. The moment they received the signal declaring the probe’s safe arrival, ESA officially earned bragging rights for years to come.
After a seven-year, 3.5-billion kilometre journey that cost billions of dollars and nearly a century’s worth of collective labour, the Huygens probe punched through the forbidding atmosphere of Saturn’s Titan. The hour-long transmission from the ghostly, frozen world will provide material for decades worth of data crunching.
Last year began inauspiciously for the agency that, after 30 years of relative obscurity, had begun to show serious ambition. When its Beagle 2 Mars lander was declared lost in space last January, it was a massive blow to the agency’s ego.
That was all forgiven a few weeks later, when the first stunning pictures returned from ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. Its incredibly high-res images beamed directly from space to media around the world, along with some news: The mission had uncovered the most direct evidence yet of water on the Red Planet’s surface.
ESA was finally seeing its dreams come alive…
This article is part of Digital Journal‘s Spring 2005 issue. To read the rest of this story, pick up your copy in bookstores across Canada or the United States!
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