DANG HUBCAPS ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE:

Europeans, NASA Land a Big One: Saturn's Titan (John Johnson, January 15, 2005, LA Times)

The Cassini-Huygens mission launched from Cape Canaveral on Oct. 15, 1997. The spacecraft arrived at Saturn in June, flew through its rings and then released the hubcap-shaped Huygens probe on Dec. 24. Over the last three weeks, the 9-foot-diameter probe flew solo on its way to the bizarre moon.

Its final two-hour descent to the moon's surface was slowed from 12,400 mph by three sets of parachutes. The probe began broadcasting information back to Earth within four minutes of landing on the moon and continued broadcasting for more than an hour, about the limit of its battery power, scientists said.

Titan has been the subject of great scientific curiosity for the last 25 years, since Voyager 1 revealed what an odd world it was. Titan, discovered by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens in 1655, is the only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere, one made up of methane and nitrogen, producing the orangish tint that until recently hid the surface from observers. It's atmosphere is similar to Earthly smog.

In that way, it is thought to be a model of the early Earth, before life began and oxygen was produced by plants. Scientists are confident life could not develop on the surface of Titan because it is too cold at minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. It is so far from the sun that the strength of the light reaching its surface is a thousand times less than on Earth.

Speculation over what the probe might find was as varied as cold liquid seas or a spongy, plastic-like surface.

One picture from the surface showed a barren, Mars-like landscape. The only difference was that the small, rounded boulders in the foreground were ice blocks, according to ESA researchers.

Torrence Johnson, a member of the mission's camera team, said from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that planetary surfaces "look pretty much the same everywhere." That doesn't mean strange things are not going on outside the camera's eye. He said the lack of craters indicated the surface is young. Drainage channels show that something, perhaps hydrocarbon rivers, flowed across the surface at some point.

It was unclear exactly where the probe landed. Pictures taken during a Cassini fly-by several months ago showed bright and dark areas, but scientists could not estimate the elevations of those areas. Johnson said the new pictures seemed to prove that the bright, icy areas are at a higher elevation than the darkened surface, where he thought the probe had landed.

Some scientists had speculated that the dark areas were hydrocarbon seas, but the evidence from the probe seemed to show it to be a hard surface.

"This proves pretty conclusively there are not liquid oceans," said Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager at JPL. "That's not to say there's not lakes or ponds."

Nonetheless, no one was complaining about the results.