Huygens made the first successful landing on Saturn’s moon Titan.
The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe separated from NASA’s Cassini orbiter in December 2004 and entered Titan’s atmosphere on January 14, 2005. It descended beneath a heat shield and parachutes, using instruments to study the moon’s atmosphere and surface.
Huygens landed near the Adiri region and transmitted data for about 90 minutes from the surface. It returned the first images of Titan’s landscape, which showed rounded stones and channels shaped by flowing liquid hydrocarbons. Titan’s thick nitrogen-rich atmosphere and methane cycle make it one of the most Earth-like worlds beyond Earth.
Cassini was the larger spacecraft that carried Huygens to Saturn and studied the planet and its moons from orbit. It did not land on Titan. Huygens remains the only probe to land on a world in the outer Solar System.