Keeping up with Cassini

Cassini's Huygens probe touched down on Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, and has sent back its first images of the surface. This is the very first time we've ever had a look at Titan at all.



I'm glad to see that the wonder of all of this stuff makes even the strait-laced scientist types well up: "The European Space Agency deserves a tremendous amount of credit," said NASA’s Al Diaz, NASA's associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, while appearing to hold back tears during one of many press briefings on the probe's status today. "There will only be [one] first successful landing on Titan, and this was it." Check out the article for more about the probe and its mission.

Huygens has already sent back 350 photos for analysis, which is only about half of what they expected to get during the probe's mission. Apparently there was a glitch somewhere that kept them from receiving the rest. Even so, 350 photos will given scientitsts a lot to analyze, so I would expect we'll be seeing more nifty views of Titan in the future.