Enceladus could be the best place beyond Earth to look for life
JUN 01, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025354
Nature: Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus has some of the chemical ingredients for life—liquid water, organic carbon, and nitrogen—plus a source of energy in its tectonically active crust. As Nature‘s Richard Lovett reports, a recent workshop held at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, attendees brainstormed ideas for finding life on Saturn’s sixth-largest moon. Although the Cassini spacecraft is currently in orbit around Saturn and has flown by Enceladus 27 times so far, it lacks the instruments to detect the molecular signatures of life. One promising approach is to look for differences in the concentrations of carbon-12 and carbon-13 in methane and other molecules. Whereas biochemical reactions favor the lighter isotope, nonbiochemical reactions favor neither isotope.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
