New Photos Show Titan Has Orange Surface

Probe Still Relaying Pictures Back to Earth

Now this is cool:

Many scientists at the European Space Agency center in Darmstadt, Germany, looked tired from their overnight work but were still clearly elated about the successful arrival of data from Huygens the day before – a major triumph for the European space program.

‘The instruments performed brilliantly,’ said John Zarnecki, in charge of the surface instruments. ‘We can’t find a single missing data frame. The link and the quality of the data was absolutely superb.’

Officials played back sound gathered from Huygens’ microphone at the surface – a whooshing noise they did not identify. But the center of attention was the pictures.

One shot taken from an altitude of 10 miles showed dark lines that suggested stream beds carved by liquid flowing into a dark area suspected to be a sea of liquid methane – with light areas in the dark that could be islands.

Now I thought the theory was that we couldn’t land much of anything on Titan because of the methane seas – literally one spark would ignite the whole planet! Still, the photos are very cool.