If I may briefly interrupt the politics ... today is a fantastic success for space exploration in general and cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency.
The ESA-built probe "Huygens", after being carried from earth by the NASA orbiter Cassini, has successfully touched down on Titan, a moon of Saturn. We're getting images returned from the surface of the planet now, and the descent images appear to show rivers, a shoreline, and a lake or ocean. That's exciting and exotic, because Titan is far too cold for liquid water; these would have to totally bizarre oceans, like liquified ethane or other hydrocarbons. The chemistry leads to the exciting possibility that the huygens probe could even have detected life in the 90 minutes it survived on the surface. We'll know in the next few days as the data are analyzed.
Titan is many times further away than the previous record for soft-landing on a planetary body ... Mars. It's also the only time spacecraft have landed on a moon other than our own.
Huygens had batteries for five hours of operation, and used them all. Scientists were hoping for good pictures of the descent and some chemical analysis of the atmosphere, but there was always a reasonable chance the probe would be destroyed on impact or would land in an ethane puddle and vanish. Instead, it stayed alive for at least 90 minutes after landing on solid ground and transmitted its science data to the Cassini orbiter. Cassini then turned its' antenna towards Earth after going over the horizon, and began transmitting the collected data: all of it will arrive over the next few hours and days.
I've put some pictures up on my blog, and others plus analysis are becoming available on The ESA's website.
This page at arizona state is posting the raw images as soon as they come off the radio telescope.