Destination Titan Page #2

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was from the Voyager spacecraft.

We knew that Titan was about 5,000 km in

diameter, so bigger than the planet Mercury.

It had a thick atmosphere.

This is what really made it stand out

amongst all of the planetary

satellites in the solar system.

It's the only one that does.

But we knew essentially

nothing about the surface

because Titan is permanently shrouded

in orange haze or smog,

which meant that none of the images

showed anything of the surface.

We know it's very cold.

Saturn and its satellites

are so far from the sun.

The atmosphere is very complex,

it was known to have at least 12

different gases and probably having

some similarity to Earth's

very primitive atmosphere,

one that we lost

probably billions of years ago.

There was organic chemistry on Titan which was

interesting but that Titan wasn't warm enough

to have a liquid water which of course is one

of the prerequisites for life as we know it.

And I think Titan sort of faded

into the background in a sense

for much of the following decade.

Well, towards the end of the 1970s,

jobs in British universities

were very difficult to come by

and I saw an advertisement,

which was very hard to resist, to go

and work on a project called Giotto.

Now Giotto was Europe's Halley's

Comet mission and the job was at the

University of Kent to be project

manager for the dust instrument.

I applied and I got it so, at the

end of 1981, we moved to Canterbury

on a two-year contract and I

ended up staying there 18 years.

Giotto flew 594 km from

the nucleus of Halley's Comet.

I mean, it was remarkably close.

And we detected about

These are the particles

that make up the tail of a comet.

I think it was a mission that gave Europe confidence

that it could really do ambitious things in space.

After the success of Giotto,

the European Space Agency

were very democratic about selecting

the next scientific mission.

They had five candidate missions

and we got involved in a team

on a mission called Vesta.

Now Vesta was going to fly

past an asteroid

and we were part of the group that was looking

at the possibility of firing some penetrators.

They would be fired into the surface of the asteroid

and make measurements of the physical properties,

and we came to the day of selection and, to

our horror, it wasn't Vesta that they chose.

They selected a mission called

Cassini, going to a place called Titan -

a place that I'd hardly heard of and we

were completely deflated and ejected by this.

I remember still the journey

back to Canterbury from Bruges.

We went on the train and the ferry, and

it was a pretty depressing, glum journey.

We got back to the lab and I said,

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