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

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT, and she serves as deputy science director on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which aims to find planets around stars relatively close to the sun, searching for worlds that are ideal follow-up targets for missions like the James Webb Space Telescope.

Mike Laidley leads development of Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Launch system, a rocket the commercial space company hopes will provide a foothold in the lucrative market to launch U.S. military satellites, a business currently dominated by SpaceX and United Launch Alliance.

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.