Perhaps the most exciting part of the Cassini spacecraft's 12-and-a-half years orbiting Saturn was back in December 2004, when the mothership deposited the European Space Agency's Huygens probe. Twenty days later, in January 2005, Huygens became the first spacecraft to land on an object in the outer solar system. To this day, the Huygens probe's touchdown on Saturn's moon Titan remains the most distant landing ever achieved by humankind.

Titan turned out to be a fascinating alien world. Under the thick orangish clouds that surround the moon, flowing rivers and lakes of hydrocarbons (likely liquid methane and ethane) make Titan the only object in space other than Earth that is known to have stable bodies of surface liquid. On Titan, temperatures remain hundreds of degrees below zero. But even so, scientists can't help but wonder if life swims in the methane seas of the alien moon—life fundamentally different from anything found on Earth.

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A new video from NASA JPL uses photos and data taken by the Huygens probe during its decent to recreate the landing, from atmospheric entry to touchdown on a barren alien floodplain. Even though Huygens had only minutes to transmit data to Cassini before the mothership dipped below Titan's horizon, leaving Huygens cut off from humanity, the little probe still managed to reveal the rugged highlands and intricate ravines and drainage channels that crisscross the mysterious world.

"The Huygens images were everything our images from orbit were not," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead, in a JPL press release. "Instead of hazy, sinuous features that we could only guess were streams and drainage channels, here was incontrovertible evidence that at some point in Titan's history—and perhaps even now—there were flowing liquid hydrocarbons on the surface. Huygens' images became a Rosetta stone for helping us interpret our subsequent findings on Titan."

From: Popular Mechanics