By Sylvestre HUET

Saturday January 15, 2005 (Release - 06:00)

Oil rivers? Eroded stones? Hydrocarbon extents? In Darmstadt, in the center of control of the European space Agency, the astrophysicist Michel Blanc acknowledges himself " moved ", while lending himself willingly to the wild interpretation of the first image sent by the Huygens probe. It is not tous.les.jours which Homo sapiens discovers a new world.

A remote world beyond any human experiment: 1,2 billion km separated Friday evening the Earth from its special correspondent in the suburbs from Saturn. Two hours after having been posed on Titan, Huygens still lived. Indubitable sign of the technological exploit successful Friday by the ESA, worthy of Pioneer and others Voyager which opened the ball in the Seventies and Eighties. As for the astrophysicists, between champagne and entrechats of excitation, they were ébaubissent of the first three photographs in black and white of the surface hitherto unknown of the star, catches to 16 km of altitude, 12 meters then a few meters only.

On the first clearly appears a dark zone without relief and a traversed clear zone of a fluviatile network. A system of flows, by ­ 180 °C whose fluids are probably hydrocarbons, surmounted reliefs of water ice. On the image taken to 12 km, one sees something ­ very strong luminous contrasts but enigmatic. The last, catch with with a few meters of altitude, right before the shock, shows an eroded stone field, posed on a perhaps granulous substrate, " one would be believed over Mars... but the color is certainly very different". It is the side camera which took this image, one sees the horizon there.

The success of Huygens is total. All the instruments functioned, all the data are recovered... except those on the speed of the wind but the terrestrial radio telescopes collected Huygens with such a precision that one will be able to deduce it from the signals. The astrophysicists now await the results of the chemistry experiments, to know if the atmosphere of Titan manufactures the prebiotic molecules, the bricks of the life.