Cassini and Huygens

This is a build of Nasa's Cassini orbiter and Esa's Huygens probe which was attached to the side of Cassini during the ride to Saturn. The mission launched in 1997, and arrived in Saturn's orbit in 2004. During its orbits Cassini flew by some of Saturn's moons, one of which was Titan (Saturn's biggest moon). On Cassini's second Titan flyby, Huygens detached from Cassini and descended into Titan's atmosphere. Huygens imaged its two hour decent and after landing successfully, took the first ever picture of Titan's surface. Huygens's lasted one hour and ten minutes in the harsh environment before contact was lost with it. Cassini would continue orbiting Saturn for a total of thirteen years, in which it returned over 130 gigabytes of data and more than 450,000 images. Cassini began it's "Grand Finale" in April, 2017 and on September 15, 2017, in which it used the last of its propellent to plunge into Saturn's atmosphere, sending scientific data until (sadly) it burned up.

The Set includes Cassini, Huygens (not to scale with Cassini!) and a display stand and base for anyone who doesn't want to fly Cassini around the room... or just wants to display it.

Attached to Cassini you can also see a scale version of Huygens encased in it's heat shield. The build contains a total of 305 pieces.

Thanks for reading!