The probe hurtled into Titan’s atmosphere at 6km a second, the atmosphere would have been glowing violent around the probe as it decelerated. Once on a parachute, the probe descended for the first 80 miles, seeing nothing but smog and haze. 

 

As we got closer to the surface down into about 30km, the surface features started to peak through with the haze. Progressively this landscape emerged, all these bright hills cut by small dark channels that show there had been rain, definitely some time in the past. 

 

The signal was taking over an hour to reach earth.. No doubt, Huygens was sending postcards from the edge.

 

There are just 20 of us in the office area where the pictures were delivered, it was dark in Germany, it was the winter. You really felt like we were out there gazing at this alien world that was just at our doorstep. 

 

The probe drifted further, snapping these remarkable images all the way down. We all kind of saw, you know, our backyard in Arizona, or the friends in revere, wherever it was, you were from, you sort of saw some aspect of Titan that looked familiar. 

 

They were everything whether our images from orbit or not, because you could see a dendritic drainage pattern that looked like a river system, just like a river system would appear on the earth. Boy, that was heady, that was like, oh, it was like Joes Verdun come true, it was just spectacular.