Titan

Exploration of Titan

Titan was examined by both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, with Voyager 1's course being diverted specifically to make a closer pass of Titan. Unfortunately Voyager 1 did not possess any instruments that could penetrate Titan's haze, an unforeseen factor. Many years later, intensive digital processing of images taken through Voyager 1's orange filter did reveal hints of the light and dark features now known as Xanadu and the Sickle,[52] but by then they had already been observed in the infrared by the Hubble Space Telescope. Voyager 2 took only a cursory look at Titan. The Voyager 2 team had the option of steering the spacecraft to take a detailed look at Titan or to use another trajectory which would allow it to visit Uranus and Neptune. Given the lack of surface features seen by Voyager 1, the latter plan was implemented. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reached Saturn on July 1, 2004 and has begun the process of mapping Titan's surface by radar; The Cassini probe flew by Titan on October 26, 2004[53] and took the highest-resolution images ever of the moon's surface, at only 1,200 kilometers,[53] discerning patches of light and dark that would be invisible to the human eye from the Earth. Huygens landed on Titan on January 14, 2005,[54] discovering that many of the moon's surface features seem to have been formed by flowing fluids at some point in the past. Present liquid on the surface may be found near the north pole, in the form of many lakes that were recently discovered by Cassini.