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July 23, 2005
Life on Titan?
I normally don't blog on space exploration, not because I'm not interested in it but because one must have some focus even if one has Abnormal Interests. However, I couldn't resist this one.
The New Scientist asks, "Has Huygens found life on Titan?" And the answer is, "let's wait and see." But what Huygens has found is very interesting and the speculation is tantalizing.
Titan's atmosphere is about 5 per cent methane, and Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, thinks that some of it could be coming from methanogens, or methane-producing microbes. Now he and Heather Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, have worked out the likely diet of such organisms on Titan.They think the microbes would breathe hydrogen rather than oxygen, and eat organic molecules drifting down from the upper atmosphere. They considered three available substances: acetylene, ethane and more complex organic gunk known as tholins. Ethane and tholins turn out to provide little more than the minimum energy requirements of methanogenic bacteria on Earth. The more tempting high-calorie option is acetylene, yielding six times as much energy per mole as either ethane or tholins.
[snip - in which it is noted that if there are methanogens on Titan then hydrogen levels very near the surface would be depleted by three orders of magnitude when compared with hydrogen levels at higher levels of Titan's atmosphere]
One hope for testing their idea rests with the data from an instrument on Huygens called the GCMS, which recorded Titan's chemical make-up as the probe descended. It will take time to analyse the raw data, partly because hydrogen's signal will have to be separated from those of other molecules. "Eventually, I hope, we will have numbers for at least upper limits for hydrogen," says Hasso Niemann of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, principal investigator of the GCMS.
Go read the complete article. If there is life on Saturn's Titan, how did it get there? Did it originate on Titan or hitchhike there via an asteroid or comet? Abnormally interesting questions but they are a little premature.
Posted by Duane Smith at July 23, 2005 9:27 AM | Read more on Science - General |
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