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Space probe lands on Titan 

“These are extraordinary images. I never thought I would see something like this even in my wildest dreams,” said Claudio Solazzo, mission operations manager for the European Space Agency.

The European-built probe, Huygens, landed this morning on Titan, one of Saturn's 33 moons. The probe snapped the pictures from 16 kilometers (10 miles) above the Titan’s surface. Agency officials said they have about 350 images so far. 

Other space agency officials remarked that the moon shows an extent of complexity and dynamicism rivaled by few other Solar System objects.

Bigger than the planets Mercury and Pluto, Titan is one of the few moons in our solar system with its own atmosphere. The moon is cloaked in a thick, smog-like haze that scientists believe may be very similar to Earth's before life began more than 3.8 billion years ago.

There was no immediate word on what the apparent shorelines might be, nor what sort of ocean they might represent. Some scientists have speculated Titan may have oceans of methane. Methane is a substance that on Earth is a colorless, odorless gas, produced when living things decompose, and commonly used as a fuel.

Further study of this moon promises to reveal much about planetary formation and, perhaps, about the early days of Earth as well, scientists believe.

The probe's descent was the last phase in a seven-year journey strapped to the Cassini Orbiter, a spacecraft built as a collaboration among 17 nations. The Cassini spacecraft, the first to orbit the Saturn system of rings and moons, began its orbit on June 30. Huygens was released from Cassini on Dec. 25 and later dropped through Titan's atmosphere, collecting data as parachutes slowed it from super sonic speeds.

The probe carries six instruments designed to study the content and movements of Titan's atmosphere and collect data and images on the surface. It sends data and images to the Cassini mothership, which relays them to Earth.

The probe began transmitting data to Cassini four minutes into its descent and continued to transmit data after landing at least as long as Cassini was above Titan's horizon. The first confirmation that Huygens was alive came this morning when the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, USA, picked up a faint but unmistakable radio signal from the probe.

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