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The Huygens probe: Piercing Titan's secrets of life
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(CNN) -- Titan is appropriately named. It's colossal, as moons go, larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto and 40 percent the size of Earth. It's the second-largest moon in our solar system, after Jupiter's Ganymede.
It's also the only moon in the solar system known to have a thick atmosphere -- 10 times as thick as Earth's, in fact. A mixture of mostly nitrogen and methane, Titan's atmosphere -- and a haze that rises 120 miles above the surface -- hides it from view.
Beneath the opaque clouds, Titan's surface temperature is estimated at -288 degrees Fahrenheit (-177 Celsius). Oceans of liquid ethane surround a blot on infrared images that scientists believe may be a continent.
Mission in Detail:
-- Huygens probe designed by European Space Agency.
-- First craft to land on Saturn moon.
-- Probe will study Titan's atmosphere and organic chemicals.
Into this forbidding landscape, Cassini will dispatch the Huygens probe.
Named for Christiaan Huygens, the 17th-century Dutch astronomer who discovered Saturn's rings and first observed Titan in 1655, the probe was built by the European Space Agency.
The 700-pound, 9-foot-wide Huygens will be released by Cassini four months after it begins orbiting Saturn in 2004.
It will take two and a half hours to drift to the surface of Titan. During its descent, the probe will measure the atmosphere's chemical composition and snap hundreds of pictures of Titan.
Once down, Huygens will have enough battery power to transmit data from the moon's surface back to Cassini for up to 30 minutes -- as long as it survives the impact and the unknown perils of Titan's frozen surface.
If Huygens performs as planned, mission planners say it may help confirm a key theory: that Titan contains some of the same organic chemicals that existed on the early Earth before primitive life arose.
Because of its frigid surface temperatures, "Titan is almost certainly not the home of life today," said Jonathan Lunine, a University of Arizona planetary scientist.
But by studying Titan's natural laboratory, researchers say they hope to learn more about how Earth evolved into a life-bearing planet.
"For all the superb research that has been done in laboratories, we don't yet know how life on Earth came to be," Lunine said.
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