Enceladus, Saturn’s icy moon, photographed from a distance of 141,000 kilometers by the Cassini spacecraft. – NASA, JPL | SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
MADRID, May 13. (EUROPE PRESS) –
Environmental simulation of an icy moon confirms that it is possible that conditions that support or sustain life in alien oceans they leave molecular tracks on the ice grains.
In 2018Very large organic molecules have been discovered in icy particles on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, including some that are normally the building blocks of biological compounds. It is not yet clear whether they indicate the existence of life or were created in some other way.
The data was recorded using the low-resolution instrument from NASA’s now-completed Cassini mission. However, this could indicate that the ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is full of organic molecules. “And that means it’s possible there are chemical reactions going on there that could eventually lead to life,” he explains. it’s a statement Nozair Khawaja, first author of the new study as a researcher at FU Berlin and currently working at the University of Stuttgart.
Scientists also suspect that there are hydrothermal fields on the ocean floor of Enceladus. Until now, it was not clear whether the discovered organic molecules originated in these fields. Khawaja and his collaborators looked for a way to answer this question and published the results in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.
“To this end, we simulated the parameters of a possible hydrothermal field on Enceladus at the FU Berlin laboratory,” says Khawaja. “We then investigated what effects these conditions have on a single chain of amino acids.” Amino acids are the building blocks of protein and the foundation of all life as we know it.
In a test facility temperatures of 80 to 150 degrees Celsius reigned and a pressure of 80 to 100 bars, about a hundred times greater than on the surface of the Earth. Under these extreme conditions, the amino acid chains characteristically changed over time.
But is it possible to detect these changes with the measuring instruments of space probes? In other words, do they leave a clear signature that we should be able to find in Cassini data (or future space missions)?
A measuring instrument on board the Cassini space probe, the Cosmic Dust Analyzer, analyzes dust and ice particles from Enceladus in space, They move at speeds of up to 20 kilometers per second. High-speed collisions between these particles cause the material to vaporize and break down the molecules it contains. The fragments lose electrons and then become positively charged. They can be attracted to the negatively charged electrode, and the lighter they are, the faster they will reach it.
It is possible to receive a call “mass spectrum” measuring the transit time of all fragments. This can then be used to draw conclusions about the original molecule.
However, it is difficult to apply this measurement method in the laboratory. “Instead, for the first time, we used an alternative measurement method called LILBID on ice particles containing hydrothermally altered material,” explains Khawaja.
“This provides mass spectra very similar to those from the Cassini instrument. We used this to measure the amino acid chain before and after the experiment. In the process we found characteristic signals that were caused by reactions in our simulated hydrothermal fieldThe researchers will now repeat this experiment with other organic molecules under long-term geophysical conditions in Enceladus’ ocean.
Their findings make it possible to search for such markers in Cassini data (or in data from future missions). If found, it would be further evidence.
