Editing Open University (section)

=== Research ===
Like other UK universities, the OU actively engages in research. The OU's Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute has become particularly well known to the public through its involvement in space missions. In October 2006, the Cassini-Huygens mission including 15 people from the OU received the 2006 "Laurels 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. {{Citation needed|date=February 2018}}

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.<ref name="oro">[http://oro.open.ac.uk/ Open Research Online], accessed 21 September 2008, 2h03Z.</ref>

The Open University produced in collaboration with [[Springer Nature]] the [[Computer Science Ontology]], which is a large-scale automatically generated [[Taxonomy (general)|taxonomy]] of research topics in the field of [[computer science]].