Observations of Titan, a distant moon of the planet Saturn, show that a frozen mixture of ammonia, water and methane are being spewed from volcanoes into Titan’s atmosphere, according to the San Fransisco Chronicle. At the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco, scientists described the observations made possible by instruments aboard the Cassini spacecraft. Episodes of brightness and darkness were detected by the visual imaging mass spectrometer (VIMS).
“Our VIMS spectrometer, gathering images in the infra-red, told us it was ammonia being deposited over water ice,” said Robert Nelson, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Ammonia was thought to exist on Titan only beneath the surface, and here it was: Ice thrusting up through the surface along with water, and probably methane, too.”
Giuseppe Mitri, also at Jet Propulsion Lab, proposed that Titan’s solid rocky core contains elements that produce the warmth from radioactivity that could be responsible for the solid ice and water eruptions at the surface.
Nelson said that the ice was behaving just like magma does in the Earth’s volcanoes, but in this case, results in a sort of “cryovolcano.”
Given this discovery, NASA is now looking to plan two life-seeking interplanetary missions to look for precursors of microbial life or evidence of the current existence of life, both on Titan and on Europa, the ice-crusted moon of Jupiter.
