Titan, Where It Rains Methane Every Day

The pictures are interesting, but what scientists hope to gain from the study of Saturn's moon Titan is even more so -- a lot of them quite literally look at the images from that distant world and believe they're looking back in time to what it was like on Earth eons ago.

When the ESA's Huygens lander touched down on Titan's surface, it didn't hit with a thump. It didn't land with a "kersplash!" Instead, the vehicle landed in a sort of hydrocarbon sludge -- a slushy mixture of what to scientists, looks like a sea of liquified natural gas.

"We have a very primitive environment here. We can do some cosmic time travel here," said Tobias Owen of the University of Hawaii.

US News and World Reports quotes ESA scientists in Germany as saying they now believe the temperature on Titan is a rather chilly -300F. While the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, it's also about six-percent methane.

Although its batteries are now dead, Huygens was able to relay a wealth of information back to Earth -- data retransmitted by the Cassini vehicle before it dropped below Titan's horizon. For three hours after that, the data was picked up by attentive radio telescopes pointed at the distant moon.

From what scientists can gather, the Huygens probe broke through the brittle surface of those frozen hydrocarbons, and settled in a sort of methane slush.

There is evidence of water and its interaction with the geology of the moon's surface. But as far as the predicted oceans of mixed hydrocarbons -- well, that wasn't seen by the probe's cameras on the way down.

"Suffice it to say this is a planetary scene like no other, vaguely disturbing and nightmarish to me and certainly not Mars or Venus," Jonathon Lunine of the University of Arizona, told US News.

There are no signs of meteor impacts, a strong suggestion that the surface of Titan is constantly changing. Martin Tomasko, chief scientist for the Arizona camera system, told US News, "The materials are different, but we see similar processes [on Earth]: precipitation, erosion, shorelines, and dry riverbeds."

The abundance of what looks a lot like prehistoric petroleum reportedly prompted one NASA wag to quip, "Wait till Dick Cheney gets wind of this!" (Vice President Cheney, of course, served as head of Halliburton, one of the world's biggest oil field exploration companies, before joining the Bush team in Washington).

"It is, by far, the strangest place in the solar system," says Bob Mitchell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA.

Can those hydrocarbons be mined for their energy? Stay tuned...

FMI: www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/index.html