Q&A with Jonathan Lunine on Enceladus’ prospects for life

Ten years ago Wednesday, on Jan. 14, 2005, a compact, flattened cylinder called Huygens, chock-full of sensors, cameras and scientific experiments, went hurtling through the orange skies of the mysterious moon Titan.

A sequence of images captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft last month are the most detailed pictures ever taken of Saturn’s famous rings, revealing complex, unexplained bands and the movements of dozens of tiny icy moonlets spinning around the planet.

Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute leads the science team on NASA’s Juno mission, a robotic spacecraft now on final approach to Jupiter designed to probe the giant world’s deep interior and unravel how the solar system’s king planet formed.