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- The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a $1.1 million, five-year grant from NASA’s Astrobiology Institute to identify biosignatures of life on Titan—Saturn’s largest moon—from either currently living or long-extinct life.
- Titan’s ocean, which sits below a thick ice layer, is believed to have conditions favourable to life.
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- Until the NASA Cassini mission—which in 2005 sent a small spacecraft on several data-collecting flybys of Titan before it landed on the moon’s surface, where it collected and transmitted data back to Earth—little was known about Titan except that it had a hazy, nitrogen-rich atmosphere. Cassini revealed that Titan has seas of liquid methane and ethane, replenished by rain from hydrocarbon clouds.
- The mission also provided evidence that Titan has an ocean made up of water beneath a global water ice sheet that is estimated to be as much as 80 kilometers thick.
- Life on Titan would have to exist under extremely harsh conditions. This project considers the potential for life in Titan’s ocean, where the temperature ranges from -20 to 10 degrees Celsius and pressures reach 2,000 to 8,000 atmospheres, up to eight times the pressure measured under 11 km of seawater at the deepest point of Earth’s ocean.
- The essential chemical building blocks for life are present in the atmosphere, but Titan’s surface is quite inhospitable to life as we know it because of its extremely low temperature, and the absence of liquid water,”.
- . The ocean and the ocean floor are much more habitable, supportive environments for life than Titan’s frigid surface.” Scientists generally agree that life in Titan’s ocean would be microbial (small size, single-cell organisms).
- re-create conditions found in Titan’s ocean in the laboratory, grow microorganisms under these conditions (high pressure, extreme cold), and look for characteristic chemical and biological signatures that could help other researchers detect and identify life, or traces of extinct life forms on Titan and beyond.
- To do so they must construct and maintain a growth chamber at approximately -15 C at extremely high pressure..
- Pressures on Titan are two to eight times higher than previously explored life-supporting environments on Earth. They will use different kinds of microorganisms such as strains of the bacteria Moritella ,Pyrococcus as model Titan life forms to grow in the chamber, but these organisms will have to be trained to grow at very high pressure.
- Because of the intense high pressure and extremely low temperatures, the microorganisms will grow and divide very slowly.The researchers anticipate leaving the microorganisms in the chamber for several years, occasionally—and very carefully—siphoning off a small sample of cells to examine.
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