Space officials hail Titan's pictures

European space officials offered sharpened pictures today from their Huygens probe on Saturn’s moon Titan, showing a pale orange surface covered by a thin haze of methane and what appears to be a methane sea with islands and a mist-shrouded coastline.

Scientists worked all night to refine the images, taken Friday as Huygens plunged through Titan’s atmosphere before landing by parachute on the surface.

Many of the officials 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 programme.

“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.”

One shot taken from an altitude of 16 kilometres (10 miles) showed dark lines that suggested streambeds 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.

“It is almost impossible to resist speculating that the flat dark material is some kind of drainage channel, that we are seeing some kind of a shoreline,” said scientist Marty Tomasko from the University of Arizona, head of the camera team. “We still don’t know if it has liquid in it.”

Titan’s notorious haze – which has kept astronomers from getting a better picture through telescopes – is obvious in the two refined images shown today.

An image taken on the surface shows chunks of what scientists say looks like water ice scattered over an orange surface overcast by methane haze. On Friday, the chunks were described as boulder-sized, but overnight examination showed they are much smaller and simply look big because they are close to Huygens’ camera.

Deep shadows and depressions around the chunks suggest they could have been surrounded by liquid at one time, scientists said.

Shushiel Atreya, part of the group studying the atmosphere, said the instruments revealed “a dense cloud or thick haze approximately 11-12 miles from the surface”.

“Presumably there is a reservoir of methane on the surface,” Shushiel Atreya said.

The surface itself appears to be “material which might have a thin crust followed by a region of relative uniform consistency,” said John Zarnecki. “The closest analogues are wet sand or clay.”