Not everything worth doing can be done in four years. The Cassini-Huygens mission, currently beaming us pictures of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, first hit the drawing board in 1982. It was a couple of years later that scientists conceived a comet rendezvous mission. The result was the Philae lander, which touched down on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko last year.
Nasa’s Voyager probes left earth in 1977 and only now is part of their legacy bearing fruit. Two years after their launch, when Margaret Thatcher had been in Downing Street just a couple of months, the Voyager 2 probe beamed back pictures of a scarred moon covered with what looked like ice floes. It was these images that made us decide to revisit Jupiter’s ice moon Europa.
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