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. 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.