last June, scientists were thrilled when NASA's Cassini probe successfully began orbiting Saturn after a 3.5-billion-kilometer, seven-year journey across the solar system. The 6-ton spacecraft immediately started returning spectacular pictures of the planet, its rings, and its 30-plus moons. It was just the beginning of Cassini's four-year tour of Saturn's neighborhood, and while scientists expect amazing discoveries in the years to come, the most dramatic chapter in the mission's history will happen this January, when scientists attempt to peek beneath the atmospheric veil that surrounds Saturn's largest moon, Titan—a chapter that might have ended in disaster, save for one persistent engineer.

In a collaboration with the European Space Agency, Cassini, in addition to its own suite of scientific instruments designed to scan Saturn and its moons, carries a hitchhiker—a lander probe called Huygens. A stubby cone 3 meters across, Huygens was built for a single purpose: to pierce the cloaking methane atmosphere of Titan and report its findings back to Cassini for relay to Earth.

So it was quite a shock when Boris Smeds, a graying, Swedish, 26-year ESA veteran [see photo, "Unsung Hero"]., who normally specializes in solving problems related to the agency's network of ground stations, discovered in early 2000 that Cassini's receiver was in danger of scrambling Huygens's data beyond recognition.

Making that discovery would lead Smeds from his desk in Darmstadt, Germany, to an antenna farm deep in California's Mojave Desert, after he and his allies battled bureaucracy and disbelief to push through a test program tough enough to reveal the existence of Cassini-Huygens's communications problem. In doing so, Smeds continued a glorious engineering tradition of rescuing deep-space missions from doom with sheer persistence, insight, and lots of improvisation.