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To help determine whether Titan, Saturn's moon, could accommodate life, researchers are modeling many possible realities of this icy world within tiny glass jars.
On June 27, NASA announced that it would launch the Dragonfly mission to Titan in 2026. Once the mission arrived in 2034, the rotorcraft will fly over Titan's surface and travel to two dozen places to study. atmospheric and surface conditions conducive to life.
Titan intrigues, because it may be very similar to the ancient Earth before our life is hosted here, and Titan is the only moon in the solar system to have a dense atmosphere like the blue planet. Previous missions also revealed that Titan had liquid on its surface.
Related: Farewell, Titan! Cassini's last look at Cassini: fabulous methane lakes
Before the launch of the mission, however, Southern Methodist University researchers will address the issue in the laboratory with a $ 195,000 grant from the Welsh Foundation, based in Houston. To explore the possibilities of Titan's organic molecule, the team recreates the conditions of the moon in several glass cylinders, or "Titans in a jar," according to a university statement.
"Titan is a hostile place, with lakes and seas of liquid methane, as well as rains and storms of methane," said Tom Runčevski, senior project scientist and chemist at the university, in a statement. "Storms carry on the surface organic molecules produced in the atmosphere and, on the surface, only methane, ethane and propane are liquids.All other organic molecules are in their solid form – or, as we might call them on Earth, minerals. "
The European Space Agency obtained this image on 14 January 2005 from the Huygens spacecraft during its successful descent on Titan; it was the first color view of Titan's surface.
(Image credit: NASA / JPL / ESA / University of Arizona)
The team intends to imitate the process in tiny pots. "We can recreate this world step by step in a glass cylinder," he said. "First, we'll introduce ice-free water, secondly, we'll cover that layer of ice with ethane that dissolves into a" lake. "Then, we'll fill the remaining cylinder with water. 39, nitrogen. "
By then introducing different molecules into the systems, the team can mimic rainfall and drought to produce different versions of the Titan surface.
Researchers will use the data collected during the Cassini-Huygens mission to replicate Titan's conditions and, perhaps, understand how it works before Dragonfly flies.
Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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