Yoohoo! Titan has liquid lakes! Confirmed! And that means a lot for Earthlings! It means that we may not be alone in this solar system, let alone the Universe! There might be life...yes, LIFE!!...somewhere else too!!!

Whoa! Hold On! What is Titan, you may ask, if you are not an avid astronomy fella. So, lets start with the basics.

Titan is one of the 34 moons of Saturn, and the largest. It can even be seen through a normal refractor telescope. We wanted to go to Saturn, because it was one of the planets that had never been "formally" paid a visit. We (and we here means Us, Earthlings) have sent Galileo to Jupiter, the Pathfinder to Mars, the Venus Express to Venus, the Messenger to Mercury and the Ulysses to the Sun. Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been visited umpteen times till now, because of their importance in propelling spacecrafts via a technique called "Gravity Assist". Mars has also had the fortune of being in the centrestage of today's exploration, with several missions currently in place.
We also have a New Horizons mission to explore the dwarf-planet Pluto propelling through space as we speak, its near Jupiter as of today.

-->The adjoining photograph is of the frozen seas of Europa, the satellite of Jupiter taken by Galileo before it crash-landed on the moon. Europa may house life beneath this sea.


OK, so Saturn. Our phenomenal Vikings and Pioneers had flown past this planet some 30 years ago, and we were desperate to set our foot on that planet. So this Cassini-Huygens Mission.
Cassini reached Saturn in 2004 and started beaming back soon, giving the first close-up glimses of the ring systems of Saturn. And then there was Huygens.

We wanted to go to Titan. It was one of the few places in our solar system where we expected to find signs of life, because of its largely methane-filled atmosphere. In the desperation to know whether we are alone in this Universe or not (just imagine that...imagine the scale of the Universe, and we being alone...chilling...) we sent the $3.2bn Cassini to deliver the Huygens package to Titan.

The first images of Titan, taken from the orbit, swept everyone off their feet. The infrared images indicated possible presence of lakes on Titan! Now, we never expected to find water filled bodies, as the temperature on the surface is -180C. At this temperature, methane, a gas on Earth becomes a free-flowing liquid. Titan had methane lakes. It had streams flowing to fill in the lakes. It had methane evaporation-rainfall cycles. In some aspects, it was similar to what Earth was 4 billion years ago! Maybe there is life down there?

In the recent issue of Nature, the images, obtained during the Cassini Radar flyby of Titan on 22nd July, 2006, have finally been concluded to be showing methane lakes. The radar images also showed presence of a mountain range, quite nicely seen in the animation at the bottom of this page.
The Huygens landed on Saturn in 2004 and sent the first images of the New World. The mission directors were worried it would land in one of the methane lakes and get drowned, but before that it would send enough data for them to analyse for an year. Thankfully, it landed on some place that seemed to be a shore-line. This was one of the first images transmitted of the New World back to Earth.

That Titan has a methane environment means a lot to us. At the right temperatures, maybe near some volcanic sites, one may find evidences of another life. Would it be carbon-based? Would it contain DNA? How would it be shaped?

We have some more candidates for presence of life. One is Mars. With the recent discovery of water at the polar caps, we expect some life-forms to be dwelling there, of course microbial. An interesting fact revealed recently : We may have actually "bumped off" microbial life while looking for them in the Martian soil during the Viking mission. It is now hypothesized that Martian life may be partly water, partly hydrogen peroxide based.

Another is Europa. Since the moon was romanticized in the Arthur C Clarke Novel - 2010 Odyssey Two - it has long been a source of wonder. We expect to find life somewhere below its icy seas, near hydrothermal vents that may exist deep down. Maybe another mission after Galileo to explore that? It had been sanctioned, but set aside for now. People, either fascinated by the mysticism of Europa as also the knowledge-driven one, are both vociferously campaigning for a Europa lander mission like the Mars Pathfinder. But Cassini-Huygens are surely taken the shine off Europa, and we might see more lander missions to Titan now.

The third candidate is another Saturn moon-Enceladus. Some regard it as the best bet for life, because it has frozen water, like Europa and frequent volcanic activity (as shown alongside) of not magma, but water. Yes, Enceladus has volcanoes of water. Around these "hot regions" people expect to find life.


So the question still remains-anyone else apart from us? The Drake's Equation says, Yes, there is a good probability. We might take some years to verify that, and experts from SETI are quite confident that the picture will be a lot more clearer by 2025.

That is if no one nukes America by then. Such a paradox, our spacecrafts are landing on new worlds, exploring the heavens, finding newer niches and paving the way for mankind to step on these worlds soon enough. And back home, we still fight like dogs. Maybe each one of us is more concerned about keeping his/her own life than finding new life somewhere else??