Huygens

[Written during the outage, slightly overtaken by events, but since entries have been so scarce around here recently...]

Huygens made it! Still only a very few pictures, in low-res black and white, but they appear to show drainage channels, and rounded "stones" (currently thought to actually be ice) Further pictures and chemical analysis will probably take some time to decode from the data stream.

More at the European Space Agency's Cassini-Huygens page.

[Update: more images on the ESA website now, including the first colour piccy from the surface and a 360 degree panorama from 8km altitude. Some early science results, too: they reckon that Huygens landed on a mixture of water and hydrocarbon ice; there are widespread signs of erosion; surface temperature is about 94K (-179°C). Audiophiles can even get MP3s of what it heard on the way down and after landing]