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Titan photos delight scientists

First look at Titan

This first colour image of Titan's surface us darker than expected and is a mixture of water and hydrocarbon ice. Scientists initially thought these were rocks or ice blocks, but they are just the size of pebbles (Image: ESA/NASA/University of Arizona)

Scientists have hit the celestial jackpot with a long and successful look at one of the largest pieces of unexplored real estate in the solar system: Saturn's moon Titan.

Unprecedented information about the mysterious moon was being relayed to ground control teams for processing and analysis.

The data was collected by a kamikaze probe named Huygens, which made a two-and-a-half hour descent through the moon's thick hazy atmosphere and, against the odds, survived more than half an hour on the surface.

It beamed back the first images of the moon's surface this past weekend.

The first showed large, round rocks strewn as far as Huygens' viewfinder could see. The second was taken about 16 kilometres above Titan's surface as Huygens descended, and showed what appeared to be channels cut into a sloping surface.

"I'm shocked. It's remarkable," Dr Carolyn Porco, of Cassini's imaging centre, told CNN. "There are river channels. There are channels cut by something ... a fluid of some sort is my best guess."

"This mission has been like a fantasy come true," she said. "It's a great moment not only for science but for humankind."

Cassini carried the European-built Huygens probe to Saturn during a seven-year voyage, then was in position during the probe's descent to Titan to record and transmit Huygens' data to Earth.

The first playback of Cassini's data did not include information from both of the probe's communications channels, but scientists were not worried. The data is redundant, except for results of one experiment to measure Titan's winds.

Engineers will continue to troubleshoot the issue, European Space Agency project scientist Dr Jean-Pierre Lebreton says from Huygens mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.

"Personally, I'm looking forward to a whole decade of exploration," says Porco. "This is only the beginning."

Titan has been an object of fascination ever since the Voyager flyby in 1980, which revealed a large moon, bigger than Pluto and Mercury, with an atmosphere three times taller than Earth's and much denser.

The air is thick with an organic brew of compounds that resembles primordial Earth. Scientists speculate the moon may even have lakes and pools of liquid methane.

As Huygens descended, it sampled atmospheric particles, measured the pressure, temperature and winds, monitored for lightning strikes and listened for thunder and other sounds.

Another package of experiments is planned for landing.

Tags: science-and-technology, astronomy-space