Yesterday I returned home from the AAS meeting. It was a long flight day, and I logged some airport time waiting for flights. So I decided to try out the ever-present T-Mobile wireless hotspots to see if I could check on the progress of the Huygens data from Titan and the Cassini-Huygens mission via their websites. I’m sure everybody’s seen the images by now. We’re in a great age of planetary exploration when we can tune in to the latest pics from Mars and Saturn every day, if we so wish it! I can pretty well guess how excited the scientists were to find out that their probe had settled down to the surface of Titan and had returned a treasure trove of 90 minutes worth of data before falling silent.

And what a collection! I’d always pictured Titan as this place with hydrocarbon-sludge oceans and maybe a frozen surface. So, the pictures were not a total surprise in that regard. But it was still exciting to see actual rocks and a surface. A friend of mine called this morning and said that it reminded him of Venus, only many hundreds of degrees colder!

If you browse around the Cassini-Huygens web site, you’ll find more pictures, plus a neat page of “sounds” from Titan. It will be interesting to see what else they post in the next few days that will shed more insight into a world that once was hidden and veiled—and still holds surprises for us all.