Well, yesterday was pretty interesting because the Huygens probe deployed from the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn. The Cassini/Huygens mission, for those of you who don't know, was a joint project by the European Space Agency and NASA and launched just over seven years ago. It flew by Jupiter on the way, taking the first high-resolution photos of that planet since Voyager 2 visited in the 1980's.

Anywho it reached Saturn and took some really cool photos, and just yesterday deployed the probe onto Titan, a moon. Why would they pick a moon at Saturn? Well, its the only place in the solar system (other than Earth) to have liquid flowing on it. Scientists have long wondered what lay in the haze of Titan, after Voyager 2 discovered some shocking things about it. They predicted, from this information, that it had flowing seas of methane and varied terrian much like our home planet.

So far, it appears they were spot on. During the descent the probe captured pictures of the surface, revealing a hilly and very Earth-like terrian as well as dark seas with many veins and triubtaries running into them. As of right now they don't know too much, the information is just starting to come in. They did release one color picture the probe took yesterday.

First Color Photo of Titan's Service

It looks a lot like Mars and appears to have landed in a valley. It was ready to land in liquid as well. Apparently they didn't have great digital cameras back in 1997, but maybe they'll have some high resulution photos. The probe now will conduct various experiments so we can know exactly what's on the planet.

Also, it was equipped with a microphone (would have loved to see this on the Mars Rovers) so the ESA has released audio of the surface descent. Hopefully they'll release an audio clip of the probe on the surface as well, might be kind of interesting, especially if there's wind or something.

Audio of Huygens Descent

Anywho, I'm a space dork. :)