Several great explorers only made their startling and important discoveries because they were wearing an insulating blanket. An explorer called Cassini revealed staggering worlds of ice, one named Galileo revealed a landscape of unimaginably violent volcanism, while another by the name of Huygens discovered immense and beautiful lakes.
These explorers weren’t people. They were spacecraft sent to the Solar System’s nearest gas giants to learn more about them and their mysterious moons. They were each adorned, in one way or another, by a protective coat to guard against the extremes in temperature they would encounter. First developed by NASA in the 1960s, the space blanket’s gold or silver reflective sheen has become a familiar sight during space missions. It helped Cassini reveal Saturn's geyser-spewing ice moon of Enceladus, Galileo discover the tortured volcanic moon of Io around Jupiter and Huygens touch down on Titan, Saturn’s largest satellite.
