NASA scientist explains why freezing at -180° C, Saturn's Moon Titan could be home to life?

Space agencies of the world are on a mission to look for life on

Mars

where the minimum temperature could dip to -90°C. If you double it, that is to -180°C, that is how freezing Titan, the moon of

Saturn

, is. Compass Lab at

Glenn Research Center

of NASA has set its eyes on this far-away world that seems to resemble Earth's serenity. In an email interview to Shatakshi Asthana for

Navbharat Times

online, Science Lead Investigator of Compass Lab, Geoffrey Landis explains why the second largest moon of the

Solar System

could be a new home for humanity- What leads to the hope that life might exist on Titan?
Right now, since the only place we know for sure that life exists is the Earth, we don’t know where else life could exist. We do know, however, that life is made from complex organic molecules. This is one thing that we find in abundance on the moon Titan, in the form of complicated and little-understood chemicals called “tholins”. Although tholins are more similar to tar than to life as we know it, they may be the organic building blocks from which life started. To learn more, we would like to learn about the chemistry on the surface of Titan, and if possible, bring back samples to analyze on Earth.

Do any of its features, chemical or physical, bear resemblance with Earth, present-day or ancient?
Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a

thick atmosphere

, and the only body in the solar system, planet or moon, which has visible bodies of liquid on the surface. On Titan, that liquid is in the form of liquid hydrocarbons—methane and ethane—but nevertheless, in many ways, it is like Earth, with lakes and clouds and weather, even if the weather is in the form of methane rain.

How different is designing the mission and equipment for Titan/Saturn when compared to Mars or our Moon?
Titan is very different from the moon or Mars because it has a thick atmosphere, even denser than the Earth’s atmosphere. It is also extremely cold, with an average temperature of −180 °C. This means that everything we design has to be able to operate at temperatures far below anything we see on the Earth or Mars (and similar to the temperature in the middle of the lunar night,.)

What are some major blocks in reaching fruitful results?
Bringing a sample back from Titan is a very difficult project. One difficulty is simply how far away Titan is. At 1.5 billion kilometers from the sun, it’s six times farther away than Mars. This makes getting to Titan, and operating on Titan, difficult, and sending a sample back from Titan will require a lot of fuel. This is why we want to make our fuel on Titan, rather than bringing it all the way from Earth.

Has there been technology found for manufacturing fuel or is it in the works? Do we have the required equipment for other operations, like imaging and carrying experiments?

We have some proposed fuel manufacturing processes that we think will be possible using Titan resources. Studying and verifying that our ideas work is yet to be done before getting into the details of it.

Imaging and carrying technology will be demonstrated by the upcoming Dragonfly mission to Titan, scheduled to launch in 2026. This will also give us a lot better information about the surface of Titan, which we will use in mission planning.