For us enthusiasts of astronomy, geology and meteorology, scientific information collected by the Huygens probe on the surface of Saturnine moon Titan is far more enthralling than a photograph:
"We now have the key to understanding what shapes Titan's landscape," said Dr Martin Tomasko, Principal Investigator for the Descent Imager-Spectral Radiometer (DISR), adding: "Geological evidence for precipitation, erosion, mechanical abrasion and other fluvial activity says that the physical processes shaping Titan are much the same as those shaping Earth."...[C]hannels merge into river systems running into lakebeds featuring offshore 'islands' and 'shoals' remarkably similar to those on Earth. ...Huygens' data provide strong evidence for liquids flowing on Titan. However, the fluid involved is methane, a simple organic compound that can exist as a liquid or gas at Titan's sub-170°C temperatures, rather than water as on Earth.
In addition, DISR surface images show small rounded pebbles in a dry riverbed. Spectra measurements (colour) are consistent with a composition of dirty water ice rather than silicate rocks. However, these are rock-like solid at Titan's temperatures.
For those of you who don't know the significance of such a find, here it is again:
Instead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere, and instead of lava, Titanian volcanoes spew very cold ice.
Granitic in the continents and basaltic on the ocean floors, silicate minerals make up over forty percent of all common minerals; about one-quarter of Earth's crust. Quartz, feldspar, olivine, many others; all from chemical and physical processes in the cooling of the Earth's mantle's magma.
That a planetary object might function according to the same variables as Earth but with different values isn't news. That values of parallel variables could be so astonishingly unlike our own is, incredibly, a powerful statement for both the variety and uniformity of our universe.