for Team Achievement Award" from the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA). Cassini-Huygens' successful completion of its seven-year, two billion-mile journey in January 2005 to Saturn ended with Huygens landing farther away from Earth than any previous probe or craft in the history of space exploration. The first instrument to touch Saturn's moon Titan was the Surface Science Package containing nine sensors to investigate the physical properties of Titan's surface. It was built by a team at the OU led by Professor John Zarnecki.
The OU employs over 500 people engaged in research in over 25 areas, and there are over 1,200 research students. It spends approximately £20 million each year on research, around £6 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, and the remainder from external funders.
The Open University also runs the Open Research Online (ORO) website. ORO is a collection of over 40,000 open-access research outputs across a broad range of research areas.
The Open University produced in collaboration with Springer Nature the Computer Science Ontology, which is a large-scale automatically generated taxonomy of research topics in the field of computer science.
=== OpenScience Observatories ===
The university operates a collection of telescopes and other instruments at the Observatorio del Teide, Tenerife. Its facilities comprise the COmpletely Autonomous Service Telescope (COAST), the Physics Innovations Robotic Telescope Explorer (PIRATE) and an associated weather station.
== Students ==
In the 2021/22 academic year, there were 208,308 enrolled students.
=== Demographics ===
In 2019/20, 99,834 students were from England, 14,903 were from Scotland, 6,668 from Wales, 3,667 from Northern Ireland and 4,900 from the European Union, with others elsewhere. 60% of undergraduates were female, with 53% of those taking postgraduate modules being male.
According to The Guardian, a cross-sector fall in the number of part-time students was accelerated in 2012 when tuition fees rose and there …
