12 Years Later, Scientists Remember Epic Landing on Saturn Moon Titan

As NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft begins its final eight months of operation, scientists are looking back at one of the mission's most dramatic moments: the landing of the piggyback Huygens probe on the huge moon Titan. Huygens touched down on Titan's frigid surface on Jan. 14, 2005, three weeks after separating from the Cassini mothership. "The Huygens descent and landing represented a major breakthrough in our exploration of Titan as well as the first soft landing on an outer-planet moon," Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.