In 2005, an international team sent a probe called Huygens down to the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. This is a moon with a thick atmosphere, and which we now know has lakes, sand dunes, salt flats, and seasonal rains (of liquid methane). At the time, however, we'd never seen its surface below cloud cover. Here's what it looked like as it came into view.

This video is reconstructed from data that came in from several instruments as the Huygens probe fell through Titan's atmosphere. Best of all, at least for us humans with our eyes, are the cameras that were busily mapping as much as they could of Titan's mysterious surface. There is something timeless and breathtaking about watching the land masses of the moon slowly resolve as the probe falls through the cloud cover and, at last, lands on the ground.



According to NASA, which provided the camera to the ESA-funded Huygens probe:







Huygens arrived at Titan on NASA-JPL's Cassini probe, taking thousands of pictures and readings of Saturn, many of which are still being analyzed today.