The neighborhood just got a little smaller.

At 4:43 a.m. on October 15, 1997, a Titan IV-B/Centaur launch vehicle carrying the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Two minutes and 23 seconds later after separating from Tita/Centaur, Cassini was 360,000 feet above your head and traveling at 4,378 mph. Its destination? Titan, Saturn's largest moon over 800 million miles away (the small point of light at the top). If everything goes according to plan, the Huygens probe will enter Titan's atmosphere and take more than 1,100 images during its descent into an alien world. Should something go wrong, Cassini will miss its window to history and never be heard from again as it disappears into deep space.

Wanna guess who just phoned home this afternoon?

Earlier in the day, radio telescopes confirmed the probe survived reentry, successfully deployed its three parachutes and landed on the moon's icy surface. The first image from the surface of Saturn's largest moon Titan shows a rock-strewn plain stretching toward a distance horizon. The picture here is the only picture as of 4:30 Friday afternoon to be released by the European Space Agency (the lead agency for this mission).

Not to keep throwing empty beer cans at you to get your attention, but that's the suface of another moon 800 million miles away.

The incredible thing is that this image was transmitted in a stream of ones and zeros through space and took 83 minutes to reach Earth after leaving the probe. Additional data is streaming towards our planet at this very moment (via the Cassini satellite orbiting above the moon) and is being captured by radio telescopes from around the world. At least 350 images were being processed at this moment and better quality pictures are expected in the coming weeks.

But here's where it gets interesting:

1. Huygens' batteries (that's the probe currently on the surface) were designed to last just a few minutes after touchdown. Those batteries have continued to power the probe's transmitter for more than TWO HOURS after landing. No one knows why. That's strange.

2. For unknown reasons, NASA (which operates Cassini), posted and then removed an image of Titan's surface from its website. No official information was available about the vanishing image and NASA isn't talking at all about the sudden disappearance. No one knows why. That stranger.

Makes you wonder what the hell is going on up there, and what (or who's) in those pictures, huh?