Darmstadt, Germany -- A bold and perilous space adventure into a far-off unknown world achieved an extraordinary success Friday as Europe's Huygens probe descended to a safe landing through the dense atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, its camera snapping hundreds of images of a fantastic surface never seen before.

It was a triumph for the hundreds of scientists and technicians in 19 countries who have been laboring on the probe for nearly 25 years -- but an even larger triumph for human knowledge. Titan's organic chemicals are thought by many to be the very array of constituents that marked early Earth 4 billion years ago and which combined here into complex forms to launch the long journey toward life itself.

"This is a grand descent into the unknown," said an ecstatic David Southwood, the European Space Agency's science director. "The atmosphere we're about to analyze is a cooking pot for life, and all the ingredients for life are there -- except perhaps for water."

The probe's instruments all worked superbly.

This is one of the first raw images from the European Space Agency's Huygens probe as it descended to Saturn's moon Titan on Friday.

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