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The moon of Saturn shelters the extraterrestrial life?
NASA's Cassini spacecraft revealed the presence of dust storms on one of Saturn's moons. A look at how this could mean extraterrestrial life.
Dust storms have been spotted on the moon of Saturn Titan for the very first time, raising the possibility that storms are a precursor to extraterrestrial life on the celestial body.
Before his epic death in Saturn, which earned NASA an Emmy, Cassini explored Saturn and its satellites between 2004 and 2017. The new data comes from Cassini and the results were published in an article in English. Geoscience of nature.
"Titan is a very active moon," said Sebastian Rodriguez, astronomer at the University Paris Diderot, France, and senior author of the newspaper, in a statement. "We already know the geology and the cycle of exotic hydrocarbons.We can now add another analogy with Earth and Mars: the active cycle of dust, in which organic dust can form around the Titan equator . "
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Titan is similar to the Earth, in that it is the only moon in the solar system that has a "substantial atmosphere and the only celestial body other than our planet where stable surface bodies still exist," added the NASA. .
In September 2017, Cassini plunged into the atmosphere of Saturn, ending an epic journey of 20 years. While Cassini was running out of fuel, the scientists chose to destroy the spaceship rather than letting the orbiter drift around the space.
The spacecraft, which has spent 13 years exploring the Saturn system, has generated a wealth of scientific data about Saturn and its moons. At the beginning of the year, for example, NASA announced that the moon of Saturn Enceladus could support life through the discovery of hydrogen.
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Sandstorm
It is possible that storms are composed of "organic molecules," said NASA, because of the chemistry of the atmosphere. The atmosphere of Titan includes 98.4% nitrogen, 1.6% methane and 0.1-0.2% hydrogen.
However, once the organic molecules become large enough, they eventually fall to the surface of Titan and may play a role in the dust storms.
"We believe that the Huygens probe, which landed on Titan's surface in January 2005, raised a small amount of organic dust on arrival because of its powerful aerodynamic wake," Rodriguez added.
Rodriguez continued: "But what we have seen here with Cassini is on a much larger scale.The wind speed at the surface needed to raise such a quantity of dust that we see in these dust storms should be very strong – about five times as strong as the average wind speed estimated by Huygens measurements near the surface and with climate models. "
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The prevalence of dust storms and strong winds on Titan implies that the underlying sand can also be displaced and that the "giant dunes" that cover the equatorial regions of the moon are constantly changing and are still active.
James Rogers contributed to this report. Follow Chris Ciaccia on Twitter @Chris_Ciaccia
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