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July 16, 2020 - 7:00am
It’s always bloody Mars, isn’t it? Mars, Mars, Mars. In the next few weeks, three spacecrafts will set off for the Red Planet; one launched by China, one the UAE, one the USA. One, the UAE one, will be an orbiter, acting as a weather satellite; the other two will land rovers. The Nasa craft, Perseverance, will trundle about looking for life (and will carry a rather cool-looking helicopter-drone capable of operating in Mars’s thin atmosphere).
I don’t want to belittle any of this. There’s an awful lot we can still learn from Mars, about our own planet’s history, and about life. Nearly 45 years ago, the Viking mission landed on Mars with equipment to detect life, or specifically the products of metabolism — and found… something, which some of the mission scientists think could be living organisms. In my more romantic moments I like to believe that that mysterious something was evidence of extraterrestrial life (the rest of the time I assume it was a measurement error).
I get that there’s a sense that Mars is next in the exploration, the next stop on humanity’s slow journey from the East African Rift out into the cosmos. I get that.
But… a few years ago I spoke to some of the scientists behind the Cassini-Huygens mission; the little spacecraft that took those iconic images of Saturn and its moons, and deposited a little lander, Huygens, on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s great moon. Cassini’s radar discovered an ocean of liquid water under the surface of Titan, and lakes of liquid ethane and methane on its surface. It also discovered organic molecules in its atmosphere.
Cassini also flew by Enceladus, another much smaller moon of Saturn. To their amazement, they found liquid water there, another subsurface ocean, probably kept from freezing by heat generated by tidal stresses.
These two discoveries suddenly bumped Enceladus and Titan up the list of possible places to look for life. “There could be bugs crawling around” on either moon, one scientist told me. They deliberately crashed Cassini into Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017 to prevent it accidentally ending up on one of those two moons and contaminating it with Earth bacteria. (Huygens, of course, was already there: the mission may have seeded Titan with life that will suddenly liven up in a few billion years when the Sun expands and warms the frozen world.)
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SubscribeWell why not Titan? I guess time might be a factor. It takes around 3 days to get to the Moon, about 9 months to get to Mars and anything up to 2 years to get to Titan. Double those times for a round trip and then add the fact that the earth and all the other planets orbit the Sun at different rates so you might need to stay a while until the earth is within range.
“Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show
Is there life on Titan?”
It works about as well as Bowie’s original lyric, I think. Replacing “Mars” with “Enceladus” wouldn’t do though, whatever the prospects of finding life there.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-…
They announced a mission to Titan in 2019…?
“spacecrafts”?! “crafts”?! Does Unherd not employ any editors/proofreaders?
Titan – in fact all the outer worlds – are of course, utterly fascinating.
But Mars is the only planet where humans can land, survive, and maybe even thrive there one day.
And Elon Musk and SpaceX are working hard to turn a ‘possibly, maybe’ vague intention into a solid, hard-core reality.