Titan: Siren of the Cosmos

To the delight of the scientifically curious, the cosmos recently has been serving up a tantalizing smorgasbord of wonders to feed the most insatiable imaginations.

From the popular pictures of the martian landscape to the discovery of the most distant celestial body known to orbit our sun, from the transit of Venus to Hubble’s captivating snapshots from the beginning of time, space beckons millions of Americans to look heavenward in a way that recalls at least some of the passion stirred by President Kennedy’s starry-eyed vision of the 1960s.

Now, scientists are hoping soon to deliver the most intimate glimpses ever of Saturn and the shimmering rings that encircle it. After its 2.2 billion-mile journey, the Cassini spacecraft will slip through those rings and surrender itself to Saturn’s gravity, kicking off a four-year exploration of the planet and some of its 31 known moons. The spacecraft also will launch the probe Huygens, which is expected to pierce the atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon, then parachute to its surface to find out what it’s made of. And while the high-resolution pictures of the planet’s ring material will certainly capture our attention and give rise to a slew of Internet Saturn sites, said University of Maine astronomer Neil Comins, it’s Titan’s surface that has the greatest potential to unlock secrets of our own existence from 930 million miles away.

“I’m sure the pictures of the ring system will be breathtaking, and may come close to emulating the images of asteroid belts from popular science-fiction movies,” said Comins, the author of several books aimed at bringing astronomy down to earth for nonscientists. “But the most interesting thing about this mission for scientists – and people in general – is Titan, which could help us to better understand the early surface chemistry of Earth.”

Over billions of years, Comins said, the murky atmosphere of Titan is believed to have converted part of the moon’s constituent chemistry into carbon-based surface molecules.

“Those are the building blocks of life, the stuff we’re made of,” he said. “They’ve already been detected in the atmosphere, but we don’t know how much is in the ground. We have never seen the surface of Titan with visible light.”

So does this mean we should expect to see evidence of life there?

“No, and not anywhere else in the Saturn system,” Comins said. “But then again, we astronomers have been wrong so many times before regarding things related to the evolution of life.”

Comins, whose 1993 book “What If the Moon Didn’t Exist” was chosen as the theme for the Mitsubishi Corp.’s pavilion at next year’s World Expo in Japan, said the Cassini mission also could yield clues to astronomical mysteries that extend far beyond Earth itself.

“Learning about the formation of Saturn and its biggest moons may give us insight into the creation of the solar system,” he said. “And the more we look at planets in our solar system and other star systems the more ordinary the formation of planets will appear. There are about 250 billion stars in our galaxy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if 10 percent of them had planets. That could change our perspectives about the possibility of life elsewhere, which would have a huge impact on the human psyche.”