Huygens went to Titan. A stunning achievement. I can hardly wait for the color picture to be released tomorrow (Saturday) morning. The pictures so far are impressive, as is the fact that the little interplanetary voyager crossed so many millions of miles and kept on sending data long after landing, an unexpected bonus.

A European spacecraft plunged through the murky atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan today and successfully came to rest on a bizarre landscape of mystery never before explored.

Astronomers expressed joy at achieving the first landing on another planet's moon, particularly Titan, the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere.
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From the early evidence of radio signals and the first engineering and scientific data, Huygens entered the dense atmosphere on time, about 11:13 a.m., and on target with all science instruments working and gathering observations all the way down. The landing apparently occurred about 1:30 p.m. But the craft's radio signal persisted well after engineers had predicted its batteries would die.

Dr. Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the Huygens mission manager, was surprised by the persistence of the signal for more than five hours, longer than expected and the first clear indication that the craft had landed intact. These signals were more like a simple dial tone than a message of scientific data.

The nature of the landing site was not immediately known, pending analysis of pictures. Some of the best color pictures, processed to enhance detail, are expected to be made public Saturday morning. But a scientist said that the long-lived radio signal could rule out a touchdown in the hypothesized lakes of methane and ethane because the craft might have sunk in liquid. So Huygens, scientists said, may have set down on a solid plane of ice or a stretch of gooey tars.
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The challenge now is for scientists to take the results of one ride through Titan's atmosphere - "this grand descent into the unknown" in Dr. Southwood's words - and pictures of its surface and see if the moon of Saturn is, as often speculated, a time machine of planetary life. Is its hydrocarbon chemistry indeed similar to conditions that may well have existed on Earth in the early solar system? If so, what does that reveal about the chemistry of the origin of life?

With the advent of yahoos like this taking over the 1600 Crew, it's likely to be the last ambitious piece of exploration taken on in the near future...after all, we wouldn't want them to you know, find anything that might support extra-terrestrial causations for evolution and the origins of life. That might be...blasphemous or something.