Huygens at the entrance of the “European village”

The full-scale engineering model of ESA’s Huygens probe is on display on the recreated surface of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, in front of the Paris Town Hall, for Europe Day celebrations, on 9 May 2007. During preparation for the Huygens mission, this model was actually dropped by a stratospheric balloon from an altitude of 38 km in order to test and validate the probe’s descent sequence.