A few days ago the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft fired its main engine to slow enough to be captured by the gravitation field of Saturn and so begin its 4 year tour of the ringed gas giant. Whilst in the neighbourhood it will also take in Titan and Saturn’s other moons Enceladus, Hyperion, Dione, Rhea and Iapetus. There’s a total of 77 orbits of Saturn planned as well as 44 of Titan, but more interesting is that on Christmas day Cassini with launch the Huygens probe towards Titan. 20 days later it will decent though Titan’s nitrogen rich atmosphere and hopefully after a two and half hour parachute ride touch down on the surface, if everything goes well they may get up to 30 minutes more data before the batteries run out. The hope is that Huygens will take more than 1000 images as if floats above the moons surface and a few more if it survives the landing. What’s mind boggling about this mission is that distance the spacecraft has covered. Saturn is almost twice as far from Earth than Jupiter, some 13 billion kilometres as opposed to 750 million. In reality they are two unfeasibly large distances none of us can truly comprehend. And my brain just melts at how you fire a space craft the size of a small bus at a planet that far away and get it to drop off a probe on an orbiting moon whilst it’s there. I guess that’s why they call it rocket science.