Hidden Nook

Photo by NASA/Reuters (Handout)

This is one of the first raw, or unprocessed, images from the European Space Agency's Huygens probe as it descended to Saturn's moon Titan January 14, 2005. The world got its first look at the surface of the Saturnian moon Titan when pictures from the European space probe Huygens showed a possibly rocky surface with 'drainage channels' for liquids.

"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 probes status today. "There will only be [one] first successful landing on Titan, and this was it."

"If it's not a sea, it appears to be a lake of tar-like material," said John Zarnecky, principal investigator for the Huygens' Surface Science Package, which is taking data from the surface of Titan. Zarnecky said the 350 images taken by Huygens of Titan's surface were only about half the anticipated photographic harvest researchers were expecting.

Huygens was originally expected to send more than 700 pictures taken during its 2.5-hour descent to the Titan surface, but one of the two communications channels on the satellite apparently malfunctioned, cutting by about half the number of images received by NASA's orbiting Cassini satellite and relayed to mission control here.