The Bear Minimum

Could it be? Have we found the beginnings of life other than us in our solar system?

Saturn has a moon called Titan. It’s Saturn’s largest moon, actually, and it’s also about double the size of our own Moon and the only other planetary body in our solar system, apart from Earth, to have stable bodies of water. There’s also speculation that beneath the surface there are more bodies of water that could serve as a biotic environment.

Now, what’s got those clever people at NASA in a big kerfuffle is the lack of hydrogen and acetylene on the surface of Titan when the Cassini spacecraft took chemical analysis data on the moon. There’s one possibly explanation that sunlight filtered through the atmosphere is turning the acetylene into an aerosol, making it a more complex molecule and therefore harder to detect. Okay, fair enough.

The alternative, according to astrobiologists, is that there’s a methane based life form on Titan, that is consuming the acetylene that makes its way to the surface of the moon. Now, methane based life forms are mere speculation and hypotheses at this stage, but if astrobiologists can somehow prove that the acetylene is in fact being consumed then we’d know for certain that methane based life exists, and that we aren’t alone in the solar system, even if we’re sharing it with methane based microbes.

This is incredible news, and something that would be nice to see more coverage of, but that’s always the way with NASA related news. Unless there’s a rocket, media tends to offer very little in the way of coverage.

I’m hoping that scientists working with the visual and infrared spectrometer data provided by the cassini will be able to uncover more, because it would be a long while before another spacecraft could be gotten close enough to get any data on Titan, and at this stage there’s no planned missions to send a craft to Titan until 2015 at the earliest.