Titan probe Huygens sends back first 350 pictures

The European built space probe Huygens has sent back the first 350 pictures of the Saturn's moon Titan, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on Friday night.

The first picture was taken from the height of about 16 km, as Huygens descended before landing on the surface of Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn, and it showed a possibly rocky surface with "drainage channels" for liquids.

"This is absolutely a raw picture, but it has wonderful clarity," said Marty Tomasko, an Arizona University imaging specialist, pointing to what looks like "drainage channels, canyons, also maybe a shoreline."

After an interplanetary trip of over seven years, the probe Huygens landed earlier Friday on the Titan surface. Huygens' descent, on a moon about 1.5 billion km from the Earth, is the most distant ever attempted in the solar system.

The saucer-shaped probe then registered data and transmitted them home via the mother spacecraft Cassini, marking the success of the Cassini-Huygens mission worth a total of 3.2 billion US dollars.

The mission, a joint project of NASA, ESA and the Italian SpaceAgency, was launched on Oct. 15, 1997 from Cape Canaveral, in Florida to study Saturn, its rings and moons.

Huygens was separated from its mother ship Cassini on Dec. 25 after a seven-year journey to begin its free-fall toward Titan.

Named after Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, the probe's final descent toward Titan started at 1013 GMT on Friday. During the descending process of two hours and a half, it began to film Titan's surface, measure wind speed and pressure and analyze the atmosphere.

Titan was chosen for the mission since it is the only moon in the Solar System that has a substantial atmosphere.

Scientists believe the organic chemical reactions taking place on Titan resemble the processes that gave rise to life on the Earth 4 billion years ago.

Source: Xinhua