Descent Panorama of Saturn's Titan
			
		
		
		You're the first spacecraft ever to descend to Titan -- what do you see?
Immediately after the 
Huygen's probe 
pierced the cloud deck of 
Saturn's moon 
Titan 
last January, it took a unique series of  pictures of one of the 
Solar System's most mysterious moon's.  
Those pictures have recently been digitally stitched together to create 
spectacular panoramas and a dramatic 
descent movie.   
Pictured above 
is a panoramic fisheye view Huygen's obtained from about five kilometers above 
Titan's surface.  
The digital projection makes the local surface, mostly flat, appear as a ball, 
but allows one to see in all directions.   
Huygen's eventual 
landing site 
was in the large dark area below, just right of the center.
This relatively featureless, dark, sandy basin appears to be surrounded by 
light colored hills to the right and a landscape fractured by 
streambeds and canyons above.    
Recent evidence indicates that Titan's lakebeds and 
streambeds are usually dry but sometimes filled with a flashflood of liquid 
methane from rare torrents of 
methane rain.