REMARKABLE pictures of an enigmatic new world that could shed light on the origin of life on Earth were returned last night by a European probe, after a spectacularly successful landing on Saturn’s largest moon.

The first images taken by the Huygens spacecraft during its descent to the surface of Titan show a rocky landscape strewn with boulders, and criss-crossed by channels carved by flowing rivers of liquid methane and ethane. They appear to lead to what may be the shore of a sea or lake.

The £400 million mission touched down on Titan’s frozen tundra at about 10.28am GMT, landing with what scientists describe as a “squelch” into a solid but soft surface, possibly with the consistency of packed snow.

By 7.55pm, researchers had pieced together the first pictures from the solar system’s second largest moon, offering insights into conditions that are thought to resemble those on our own planet immediately before the dawn of life, and which could help to explain its origin.

One of the pictures shows boulders reminiscent of those observed by Nasa’s rovers on Mars, though scientists emphasised that Titan is very different from the Red Planet. Others show a network of rivers, formed by liquid hydrocarbons, and a dark patch that could be the shoreline of a lake or sea.

British science was in the vanguard of the success: the first instrument to make contact with Titan’s surface was a ground penetrator built by the Open University in Milton Keynes to determine what Titan’s outer crust is made of. Huygens’s parachutes and software were also designed by British companies, and the Government contributed £15.5m to the mission’s cost.

Professor John Zarnecki, leader of the Huygens surface science team, said that detailed data from the probe had already determined that it had made a soft landing. “We were prepared for a crash, a splash or a squelch,” he said. “It looks like it’s closest to a squelch. In terms of consistency, we’re on something soft, perhaps like compacted snow.”

Hugyens ended a seven-year journey across two billion miles of space by sending back just four and a half hours of data, but this was more than scientists had dared to hope for. The probe was designed to transmit data for the two and a half hours of its descent and for three minutes after hitting the surface, but sent signals to its mother ship, Cassini, for more than two hours after landing.

The surface science team said that they had 70 minutes of good data, rather than the three they had anticipated.

Jean-Jacques Dourdain, the director-general of the European Space Agency, pronounced the mission a triumph. “We are the first visitors of Titan, and the scientific data we have collected now will unveil the secrets of this world,” he said.

David Southwood, the agency’s director of science, said Huygens was a one-off shot at uncovering Titan’s secrets that was unlikely to be repeated in a generation. “This data is for posterity, it is for mankind,” he said. “Scientists, being scientists, are going to argue about what it means as we piece together our place in the Universe and how we came to be.”

Scientists at mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, last night began the task of analysing the data.

Titan is the only known moon with an atmosphere, which is composed largely of nitrogen but also contains small amounts of hydrocarbons such as methane. Similar atmospheric conditions are thought to have existed on Earth about four billion years ago, shortly before the emergence of life.

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