The European spacecraft Huygens landed safely today on the surface of Titan, the largest of the planet Saturn's moons. The landing was made by parachute. Mission control was not certain the landing was safely executed but believes it was because Huygens was still transmitting data after its scheduled touchdown time.

'We know it has landed based on the laws of gravity,' the European Space Agency's science director, David Southwood, said. 'It simply cannot still be flying. It's got to be on a solid surface, and it must be soft.'

Data will be transmitted from Huygens to scientists starting sometime this afternoon if all goes according to plan. Photographs taken by the spacecraft will follow soon afterwards.

This is the first time a spacecraft has been landed on the moon of another planet. Titan is an extremely large moon which is actually bigger than the planets Mercury and Pluto and nearly the same size as Mars.

Scientists are very excited about the successful landing. 'I'm quite confident we will have something special,' said Dr. Jean-Pierre Lebreton, mission manager at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany.

It is estimated that the Huygens craft will only have enough battery power to transmit information back to earth for anywhere between 20 minutes and two hours. According to Dr. Martin G. Tomasko, a scientist working on the Huygens project, that will still be enough to provide scientists with 'a spectacularly new view of Titan and an understanding of this mysterious world.'