Life on Saturn’s Moon Titan – They Found Something, and It Could Mean Life on Saturn’s Moon Titan!

Can Saturn moon Titan support life?

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and the second-largest moon in our whole solar system and it might be the only place in our solar system where there’s liquid water besides earth, plus it has an atmosphere that serves as a shield against solar radiation and cosmic rays, just like earth. If life was a house, titan would have a lot of the bricks you’d need to build it.

Could there be life on Saturn’s moon Titan!

Heading over there takes a long time, to get to Titan. It is a bit bigger than our moon and a whole lot heavier. It’s even bigger than Mercury, which means its gravity is still pretty weak. You’ll feel seven times lighter there than on earth. At the local gym back home you can lift 150 pounds, on Titan you can lift more than one thousand! Looking good, yeah?

The surface is mostly made up of ice. It has small mountains, craters, and a few cryo-volcanoes. They are basically the same as a regular volcano but instead of lava, this beast spits out water, ice, ammonia, and methane. There are lakes and clouds kind of like a canyon would look like on earth.

But here there’s only a tiny difference. Everything is covered in thick fog and sometimes it hails frozen methane! On earth, we use methane as fuel because it burns, but on Titan, there’s no oxygen – can’t get a fire going on this hunk of rock!! No oxygen means you need to put on an oxygen mask but you don’t have to wear a whole spacesuit like on our moon. Titan has a stronger atmosphere but it’s pretty cold like negative 300 degrees cold. The coldest it ever got on earth was negative 128 and that was right at the south pole. It’s so cold because it’s so far from the sun – almost 900 million miles.

Is there life on Saturn’s moon Titan?

Anyway, that dense fog and atmosphere stopped the sun’s rays from warming the surface. Sounds kind of extreme, but so is life. It can survive almost anywhere: take some bacteria – it can survive radiation and extremely low temperatures; some even survived a whole year in outer space, on the outside of the international space station. Titan would be a piece of cake compared to that, especially if we drilled down a bit. Many scientists believe there’s a whole ocean under the surface of Titan. Saturn’s gravity gives Titan’s core a little heat boost, plus there’s ammonia in that ocean. It’s like Titan’s version of antifreeze!

Possible life on Saturn’s Moon (Titan)

As long as the water stays liquid life’s got a pretty strong chance of success.

— Bright Side | A Popular YouTube Channel

So what’s down there? Scientists have actually found real evidence (!!!) that Titan might already have life on it there. Check out this microscopic image – this is C3H2 – it was discovered by this weird group of antenna things living in the desert in Chile. It used 66 antennas all pointed at the same place in the sky.

Life found on Saturn moon Titan!!

This C3H2 molecule can act as a building block for DNA – the code of life. Some people think that these molecules were around on our planet billions of years ago, just when life began. Scientists also checked it out firsthand with a probe that actually landed on Titan; turns out those desert antenna things were right!

Life found on Saturn’s moon (Titan)

Life on Saturn’s moon Titan

NASA has a new project – the DRAGONFLY mission. They’re gonna send a drone out there and explore Titan even more. The mission’s still about six years away and the rocket will reach Saturn’s moon nine years after that! So we’re gonna have to wait a while before we pack up and move to Titan.

After the DRAGONFLY drone lands on Titan’s surface, it’s going to whiz around like a sort of double helicopter. It’s going to have eight propellers, three feet wide since there’s weak gravity; that’s more than enough to give the drone good cruising speed. It’ll be able to fly about two miles straight up and take off and land vertically like a regular helicopter.

The main problem with the whole thing is the drone’s batteries. Scientists invented a generator that converts thermal radiation energy into electrical energy, whatever that means. One battery charge should be enough for several hours of continuous flight.

The Dragonfly is going to be carrying a lot of research equipment, so it’s not like those drones people fly in the park on a weekend. It’s going to weigh about as much as three ostriches. It’s going to have two drills, a bunch of sensors a spectro-thing (!) to find out what chemicals are lying around and it’s also going to have its own weather channel with a ton of instruments to measure temperature and clouds and stuff. Like any gadget nowadays, it has a camera on it – get ready for some beautiful picks of Titan’s epic landscape.

Nighttime on Titan lasts about eight earth days; that’s when the drones gonna be relaxing on the surface, recharging and analyzing samples. That’s a long time, but it’s actually a good thing.

Titan’s distance from earth causes a bit of a problem – a delay in communication. When NASA sends the Dragonfly a signal from mission control, it has to fly halfway across the solar system that takes over an hour in contrast the signal delay to Mars can be as little as 10 minutes and the signal delay to the moon is only about a second.

Life discovered on Saturn moon (Titan)

Scientists expect DRAGONFLY to provide more information about whether we can live on Titan or not.

Some experts hope to find a primordial soup there. It’s a whole mush of stuff needed to make life. We had that same soup on earth about 4 billion years ago and every single living organism that ever existed evolved from this mush of organic elements.

Is Saturn’s moon Titan habitable?

If the DRAGONFLY project’s a slam dunk and Titan does turn out to be habitable it’ll have one more mission to find a nice place for us to settle down in, but creating a self-sustaining colony on another planet would definitely be the hardest thing humans have ever done.

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1. First hurdle: energy production. Probably some sort of nuclear power plant.
2. Then comes shelter for humans and their machines. Those new Titan buildings will have to protect us from the extreme cold and bad weather.
3. Then drinking water and oxygen. We’d need to invent a way of collecting or engineering both.
4. Then greenhouses for growing food.

• We’d also need to mine fuel for transportation. Luckily Titans packed full of methane which is great for fuel.
• One huge problem is gravity. Because it’s so weak on Titan, whoever lives there could lose a lot of muscle mass making it hard to work and even just live.
• There are those pesky cryovolcanoes shooting stuff out at random times.

Maybe we’d need a more drastic daring idea: how about changing Titan’s atmosphere, so we can breathe on it and not have to wear about a hundred hats and gloves!! To do this we’d need to terraform Titan’s surface for a long time.

• Titan’s atmosphere needs to be enriched with oxygen for us to breathe and it would be great if it was a bit warmer.
• The next step is to create a biosphere which means plants. We could turn Titan into a blooming jungle with plants brought over from earth but because of pressure and gravity they’d look completely different from earth plants. They might all grow super tall or maybe they’d all shrink down too many size, we really don’t know.

Conclusion

First things first: we need to make sure that life is even possible on Titan. Scientists recently thought there might be life on Venus. It’s sort of the same size as earth and scientists even call it earth’s twin sister. They discovered the gas on Venus, phosphine. Supposedly it was made by living organisms. Turns out it wasn’t true. Well, not really. There is some phosphine floating around but way less than we first thought. Look, science on other planets is super hard. We’re always making mistakes like that but someday it shall be correct all along.

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