Material World

Quentin Cooper joins scientists from the Open University as they drop space instruments onto Chesil Beach in Dorset in search of clues about one of Saturn's moons, Titan. They have been working on a tiny amount of data obtained by the US/European Cassini mission's Huygens probe, which landed on Titan in January 2005. To get the most out of this data, they have since performed controlled drops of similar instruments on a wide variety of different surfaces on Earth, the latest of which is this experiment on Chesil Beach.