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Titan, one of Saturn's moons, has become the subject of study by NASA, which has already launched a mission through its helicopter Dragonfly. For the moment, what they describe on their own website is that the place is very similar to the way Earth looks, with clouds in the sky, rivers, lakes and seas flowing, among other things.
However, this occurs at -140 degrees, where the dune sands are not silicate grains, but organic matter, the rivers contain liquid methane and ethane, not water, and Titan is a frozen world. Now, through Dragonfly, which will be launched in 2028, it will be possible to investigate this place further.
"Dragonfly is not a mission to detect life, but to investigate the chemistry that preceded biology here on Earth. On Titan, we can explore the chemical processes that may have given rise to life on Earth without life complicating the picture," explained Zibi Turtle, Dragonfly principal investigator and planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
"On Earth, life has transformed almost everything, burying its chemical precursors under eons of evolution. Even today's microbes depend on countless reactions to survive. We must have gone from simple to complex chemistry before moving on to biology, but we don't know all the steps. Titan allows us to discover some of them," he continued.
The importance of the Selk crater
One of the key points of the mission is the Selk crater, which will be about 80 kilometers away from where NASA's helicopter will land. This place is covered with organic matter, and it is also believed that it could have had liquid water at some point.
"It's essentially a long-running chemistry experiment," said Sarah Hörst, an atmospheric chemist at Johns Hopkins University and a co-investigator on the Dragonfly science team. "That's why Titan is so exciting. It's a natural version of our origin-of-life experiments, only it's been going on for much longer and on a planetary scale," she said.
"We don't know if life on Earth took so long because conditions had to stabilise or because the chemistry itself needed time. But models show that if Titan's organic compounds are thrown into water, tens of thousands of years is enough time for chemistry to develop," he continued.
Morgan Cable, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and Dragonfly co-investigator, said: "We're not looking for exact molecules, but patterns that suggest complexity. We won't know how easy or difficult it is for these chemical steps to occur unless we go, so we have to go and observe. That's the fun of going to a world like Titan. We're like detectives with our magnifying glasses, looking at everything and wondering what this is," he said.