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| Science & Technology |
| Oxygen envelops Saturn's icy moon |
| 2012-03-03 |
| [Bangla Daily Star] A Nasa spacecraft has detected oxygen around one of Saturn's icy moons, Dione. The discovery supports a theory that suggests all of the moons near Saturn and Jupiter might have oxygen around them. Researchers say that their finding increases the likelihood of discovering the ingredients for life on one of the moons orbiting gas giants. The study has been published in Geophysical Research Letters. According to co-author Andrew Coates of University College London, Dione has no liquid water and so does not have the conditions to support life. But it is possible that other moons of Jupiter and Saturn do. "Some of the other moons have liquid oceans and so it is worth looking more closely at them for signs of life," Prof Coates said. The discovery was made using the Cassini spacecraft, which flew by Dione nearly two years ago. Instruments on board the unmanned probe detected a thin layer of oxygen around the moon, so thin that scientists prefer to call it an "exosphere" rather than an atmosphere. But the discovery is important because it suggests there is a process at work around the solar system's gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter, in which oxygen is released from their icy satellites. It seems that highly charged particles from the planets' powerful radiation belts split the water in the ice into hydrogen and oxygen. Dione's sister moon, Enceladus is thought to harbour a liquid ocean below its icy surface. The same is thought to be true of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede which orbit Jupiter. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #7 If you have oxygen, and you have methane, you can make moonshine, no pun intended. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2012-03-03 20:47 |
| #6 Pstanley, in the book the monolith was around Saturn. In one of Bob Zubrins books he talks about the Saturn system as the emergy depot for space fairing culture. Gotta get there in force first though. |
| Posted by: Rjschwarz 2012-03-03 07:09 |
| #5 Well, my point is that once you got out that far, maybe a thousand years from now if we haven't staved ourselves to death due to the ice age we will be in by then, you have a ready supply of water by taking hydrocarbon from one body and oxygen from the other and combining them. The result is CO2 and water. Having a source of water at the orbit of Saturn would be pretty handy. |
| Posted by: crosspatch 2012-03-03 02:56 |
| #4 Crosspatch, the trick is to get enough monoliths together to start fusion on jupiter |
| Posted by: Pstanley 2012-03-03 02:10 |
| #3 crosspatch: to get there you need something, considerably, better than rocket fuel. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2012-03-03 01:49 |
| #2 Assuming you can create enough electric power to generate light for photosynthesis. |
| Posted by: crosspatch 2012-03-03 01:07 |
| #1 Send Dione into Titan and that would make one hell of an explosion with Titan's ethane atmosphere and Dione's oxygen. Heck, that's a lot of rocket fuel up there. Mine Dione for oxygen and Titan for hydrocarbon and you have a ready source of water and CO2 for photosynthesis. |
| Posted by: crosspatch 2012-03-03 00:10 |