Saturn's Brood: Beyond the Outer Ring

The planet Saturn offers far more than rings to those who venture within its gravitational influence. This wind-swept gas giant also holds sway over no fewer than 53 moons, including such wonders as the atmosphere-shrouded Titan, two-faced Iapetus and sponge-like Hyperion. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the mysteries of the Saturnian moons.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stop
works dot com. There's peace in those rings. As we

(00:24):
spiraled into Jupiter, our orbit decaying rapidly inside the path
of the sulfurous io we assumed that we and our
forest stone bio arc were headed for the same fate
as the old Galileo probe, through the fierce radiation belts,
through the crushing gravity, into the Jovian atmosphere, and all

(00:45):
the way down. But then something happened. It was as
if a hand of a silent god reached out from
the darkness of space and just plucked us gently from
the depths of the gas giant's gravity well lifted us
up up to freedom. We still don't know what happened.
Our navigational computers have no explanation, but our orbit ceased

(01:09):
its decay, and with the slow gradual acceleration, driven from
some source totally foreign to the ship itself, we were
on our way, but not on our way home. Something
out there, some unknown force, is urging us in the
other direction. Despite the long journey, our ever dwindling share
of sunlight, and the powerful radiation bath, we just endured.

(01:33):
The plants that once struggled for life in our forest
dome are now unexpectedly thriving, as if more of the
Solar System's great moons want to be seen, want to
be understood, and some hidden intelligence is helping them. And
now the cold golden wheel of Saturn looms in the foreground,
with its major moons appearing as tiny points of light

(01:55):
in the darkness, growing ever closer as our spiral begins again. Hey,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and my name is Joe McCormick, and backed
by popular demand, we are now going to explore the
moons of Saturn. So this will be, I guess, a
sequel of sorts to the episode we did a while

(02:17):
back about the moons of Jupiter, or the major moons
of Jupiter. In both cases, these are large gas giants.
They have lots of moons, so we have to uh,
I would say pick our battles, but they're not battles,
their missions of peace and exploration, that's right. Yeah. In
the case of Saturn here there are currently fifty three
known moons, nine currently awaiting confirmation, so that's a lot

(02:38):
of moons. But we're gonna, indeed going to stick to
just the the the key items of interest here, the
ones indeed that you've likely heard of in science fiction,
that you've certainly heard of, uh in science journalism. So yeah,
we're gonna, we're gonna. We've picked up some good destinations
here for our trip. So Robert, Saturn is a kind
of different beasts than Jupiter, isn't it. Yeah, I mean

(03:00):
it's easy to lump them together. They're the two biggest
objects in our solar system, the biggest objects to enormous
gas giants, easily the two jazziest planets as well. Like
my my son who's four, I haven't really been pushing
the space agenda as much as I have like the
Earth sciences agenda, but even he instantly knows Saturn and

(03:21):
he knows Jupiter well. Saturn, I would say, is the
iconic image of a planet. Now, if you go to
if you're looking for clip art or vector images or
something like that of images of planets, you're going to
see Saturn because Saturn you can recognize it's got the rings.
It's the planet that's not just different in terms of
coloring and uh and what you might see about its

(03:43):
atmosphere or lack thereof, or cratering and stuff like that.
Its whole profile is different. It's like a different animal altogether. Yeah,
and it's it's kind of the pin up model of
the Solar System. It is the one that you see
the most, just really gleaming lt just crisp images. And
if you have just a row of globes, a row

(04:05):
of circles, the presence of Saturn, perhaps more so than
any of the others, is going to queue you in. Oh,
I'm looking at a model of the Solar System. Oh right. Yeah,
it's the difference between a bunch of balls and planets.
But it's also different than Jupiter in that Jupiter was
this very intense experience. Now Saturn also is very large,

(04:26):
it has a deep gravity. Well you know, it's got
those same things going for it. But Saturn, i would say,
is a more peaceful and colder thing to experience, unlike
the intense radiation bath of Jupiter. Yeah, it's a little
more serene. Those we'll discuss here. It itself is a
very hostile world, and its moons are pretty hostile as well,

(04:51):
at least to beings like at least two, you know,
weak fragile beings like us. We can scarcely survive outside
of a slim portion of our own planets environment. Reading
reading up for this episode, I was astonished to discover
how excited scientists are about the possibility for life and
a couple of Saturn's moons, Because when you think about
life in our Solar System beyond Earth, everybody always mentions Europa.

(05:14):
That that's the one that comes to mind, and for
good reason. There's a lot of reason to want to
study Europa from an astrobiological perspective. But Saturn has some
really good moons going for it, and we're gonna explore
what's going on on those moons today, all right. Before
we get into that, though, let's let's just roll through
some of the basics about Saturn just to give everyone
a grounding in the planet that plays host all of

(05:37):
these wonderful spheres and and ovals in a case of
alf just lumps of rock uh and the potatoes spongey potato.
So again, it's the second largest plane in our Solar system.
It's a gas giant without solid substance save it's dense, hot,
pressurized core of rock, ice, water and other compounds. And
all of this is an enveloped by liquid metallic hid

(06:00):
gen inside a layer of a liquid hydrogen. Okay, so
it's located nine point five astronomical units away from the Sun,
six planet in our solar system, as the posters tell us,
and has seven icy rings that encircle it, spanning up
to one and seventy five thousand miles or two two
thoud kilometers. So what are the rings consist of? Yeah?

(06:20):
I've always wondered this. Yeah, the contrary to what bugs
Bunny you may have taught you, if if I remember correctly,
they are not the solid rings that you can run
around on. They're not like a treadmill or anything. But
scientists haven't always known that that's true. They have not
always been aware of that. We know now that it's
it's mostly water ice. The planet's ring system extends hundreds

(06:41):
of thousands of kilometers out from the planet, but the
vertical height is typically about ten meters or thirty feet
in the wine rings. Are you serious? But but but
but there's there's there's a key butt coming up. They
can grow far larger. During Saturn's autumn two thousand nine equinox,
the Casine Any spacecraft images showed us that vertical formations

(07:03):
and some of the rings had piled the particles up,
but in ridges more than three kilometers or two miles tall.
And there's some fascinating structures and behaviors that you can
see within the rings to including these like a propeller
shaped objects you can form. It's crazy now. Light Jupiter
Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium, and in

(07:23):
the upper atmosphere, wind speeds can reach five hundred meters
or sixteen hundred feet per second in the equatorial region.
These winds fast. It's pretty fast, so it looks more
peaceful than it is. Just because it doesn't have the
big red spot doesn't mean it has some some anger
to it. Uh. These winds combined with heat rising from
the planet's in tier cause the yellow gold bands that

(07:47):
we see visible in the atmosphere. But they're not as
visible as the bands we see on Jupiter. Right, Yeah,
it's not. It's not as angry. It's not. It doesn't
look like somebody just poured a bunch of like red
liquid into you know, a swirling mixer bowl of pancake
batter in blood. That is a great way to describe it.

(08:09):
That's how I think of Jupitery. Yeah, this one is
more just like pancake batter with some with some honey
at you know, there's a wonderful coincidence with the other
episode that we recorded this week, Robert, which was the
episode on the Library of Babel. And now I'm not
sure what the publishing schedule is going to be, but
in the episode on the in the Library of Babble,
we discussed how people in the Library of Babel seek

(08:29):
out the Crimson hexagon. That's right, and indeed there is
a hexagon on Saturn. It's it does not contain any books.
It is not a room per se. Well you don't
know that, I'm pretty sure, but yes, if you look
at you I'm sure a number of people have seen
seen images of this here. But if you if you
look at various images of Saturn, there appears to be

(08:49):
a hexagon at the top, almost as if it has
a little hexagonal hat, a little skull cap on um.
And it's weird to look at because you're seeing this
in nature. This is not obviously an object designed by
anybody on purpose. But it's not circular. It's got these
clear corners. Yeah, it's not the kind of shape that
you would necessarily expect. But there is, of course a

(09:11):
very natural reason for this. This is caused by jet
streams uh in the in the wind systems of Saturn. Basically,
you have a region here that's bound on each side
by different editing editing storms. So it's uh, it's the
kind of thing if you've ever met somebody who's playing
with a lot of bubbles, you know, like doing a
lot of bubble art, and not sure what you mean bubble,

(09:33):
like blowing bubbles and sticking other bubbles, maybe blowing smoke
into those bubbles. Okay, I'm not very familiar with this
art form. Oh you're not. Oh it was Big Medicine
on like Sesame Street and and um Mr Rogers neighborhood
and back in the day, I completely lost touch with
my inner child. Well, blowing big bubbles is a lot
of fun, but blowing small bubbles too, because you can

(09:54):
join them together, and if you really know what you're doing,
you can form geometric shapes at the center where these
bubbles bubbles border other bubbles and kind of force different
shapes towards the center. Oh yeah, okay, I think I
know what you're talking about. So I try to think
of that when I think of this particular scenario to
try and remind myself that yes, uh, non spherical shapes

(10:17):
are possible within nature given the right circumstances. Now, another
quick fact about Saturn. Here a day last ten hours
and a year. The time it takes through the body
to orbit its central star last twenty nine earth years,
and the planet's a magnetic field is smaller than Jupiter's,
but still five seventy eight times as powerful as Earth's,

(10:39):
shielding Saturn and many of its moons from the solar wind. Okay,
well that's going to be important if we're talking about
I don't know, putting a colony there, yea very important.
So on that note, let's start talking about the discovery
of Saturn, the discovery of Saturn's moons. Saturn, of course,
is a very We've known about Saturn for a very
long time. Right, nobody knows who discovered sat turned because

(11:00):
the ancients knew about Saturn. We've known about Saturn as
long as we've had history. You know, naked eye astronomers
could peer up into the night sky and see Saturn.
So uh so, what we're really going to be talking
about is the first telescopic studies of Saturn. And you
might recall from the last episode that the person usually
credited with discovering the largest moons of Jupiter, the four

(11:22):
Galilean Moons, was the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, and Galileos
also given credit for discovering the rings of Saturn, though
he didn't really understand what he was looking at. Now,
like we said, everybody already knew about Saturn, but they
knew it as a point of light in the sky.
And when Galileo looked at Saturn, he saw something very odd,

(11:44):
a triple star. It looked like one enormous star with
two tiny stars attached to it on either side, like
little side cars riding along with it. Now fun fact,
Galileo wanted to get credit for being the first person
to discover this triple star, but he wasn't ready to
publish his findings yet, so he used a method that

(12:06):
I thought was pretty clever. He instead disseminated an anagram.
And by the way, when this came up, I had
to look up anagrams of our names for fun. I
have no good ones, not really. My name is I've
got comic Jock rim and that's got it. But Robert,
You've got some awesome anagrams in case you've never looked
him up before. You've got Mr babel rot that's pretty good.

(12:28):
You've also got barrel tomb, barrel to m okay. But anyway,
uh So, anagram jumbled around letters, you know, jumbled up,
and then you can you can und jumble them to
spell the original message and show if it's a sufficiently
short number of letters, you know, you can show that
you had this idea all along, and that that was
Galileo's idea. So the anagram that Galileo spread around could

(12:51):
be unjumbled to read something along the lines of I've
discovered the triform planet, and if anybody tried to scoop him,
he could just unscrambled it and show that he had
seen it first. But we now know that Saturn is
not a triform planet. So who figured that out? Well?
In sixteen fifty five. Around sixteen fifty six, the Dutch astronomer, mathematician,

(13:14):
and all around science guy Christian Hygans made a study
of Saturn through a more powerful telescope, and he made
his own discoveries so by observing how the side stars
of Saturn could disappear and then reappear. And this is
something other observers had noticed too. Hygans realized that he
was actually looking at a planet surrounded by a flat

(13:35):
disc of rings. It could disappear because of what you
mentioned about how flat it is, right, so it could
be very bright when we're looking at it at an
angle where the rings are reflecting up toward us. But
when the rings suddenly turned to where they're pretty much
perpendicular with our view, they completely disappear. There's not enough
surface to reflect anything. It's like a It's like a

(13:56):
lady in a hat with a wide brim. Depending on
how she is hold in her head, the positioning of
her neck, you may or may not see the brim
of the hat, and you'll see at a very degree y.
So she tilts her head towards you, you see the brim,
she tilts her head flat relative to your perspective, you
don't really see much. And so Hyggan's observed that. But
Hygan's didn't know what the rings were made of. I

(14:17):
think he actually thought they might be some kind of
solid structure, maybe more like the bugs money example, And
just try to imagine that in reality. Again. I love
thinking about like when you had less information and and
we just we're trying to conceive of what the universe
was like solid rings around the planet. Yeah, I mean
they based on the information available at the time. Yeah,

(14:39):
why not fascinating. But of course subsequently we learned more
about the rings of Saturn. Now, of course, Hygan's discovered
something else while studying Saturn, a moon. Nobody had seen
any of the moons of Saturn up until this time,
and he discovered the largest moon of Saturn, which is Titan,
which is going to be a fascinating thing to explore

(14:59):
in the little little bit here. But then subsequently other
moons of Saturn were discovered by astronomers like Giovanni Cassini
and William Herschel. And we're still learning more about Saturn's
smaller satellites. Today, we don't know everything there is to
know about Saturn's moons and especially it's smallest moons. Yeah. Again,
like I mentioned earlier, fifty three known moons, nine currently

(15:21):
awaiting confirmation, so we're still figuring it all out. Now.
We have actually sent exploration missions to Saturn. So there
were several fly bys Pioneer eleven, Voyager one, and two
that they did fly bys of Saturn, did a little
bit of observation, but the big one, the real hero
for for planetary science and discovery and the Saturn sphere

(15:42):
is Cassini, the Cassini Hoygien's mission. So the Cassini orbiter
entered Saturn's orbit in two thousand four during Saturn's northern winter,
and it's been conducting research on Saturn and its moons
ever since, and it has sent back some awesome photos.
One of the coolest thing about the Seni photos I've
always thought is how real photos that are taken by Cassini. Now,

(16:05):
of course they're usually like color enhanced or enhanced in
some way, but real photos taken by this probe look
like illustrations. They often they just don't look like a
picture that somebody took with a real camera. But they
are with of course some enhancements. I don't know. I
love that. I love it when reality can't pass for real. Yeah,

(16:27):
because the thing that you're photographing is so utterly unreal. Yeah,
to our earthling conceptions, to everything that we have evolved
a view here on this world. Yeah. And of course,
another part of the Cassini mission was the Huygens probe,
which went down landed on Titan in two thousand five
after Cassini reached Saturn in two thousand four, and that

(16:50):
also sent back some amazing imagery and made some fascinating
discoveries that we will talk about in a bit when
it's time to speak of Titan. So now it's time
to take a quick break. But when we come back,
we will be spiraling in towards Saturn, beginning with the
outermost moons and working our way in. All right, we're back, Robert.

(17:15):
It it seems like we're coming up on a on
a strange outer moon. Yes, we in fact, we're coming
up on the largest of the outer moons. Iapus APUs, Yes,
it didn't that sound Lovecraft. I in like something they
would worship. A chanted name appatus. You just want to
invoke it. Yeah, named, by the way for a Tartarus

(17:37):
bound Titan. So it's nice and it has a nice
gloomy feel to it. Ioppotus is not unlike the yenyang
of Chinese philosophy, to to prepare everyone for what you're
gonna see here. Uh, it's leading hemisphere is dark while
it's trailing himisphere is significantly brighter. It's a tidally locked
world like a number of moons, meaning that one side

(17:58):
always faces Saturn and the other side always faces the void.
It essentially looks like the en Yang. It essentially looks
like the black and white cookie from that episode of Seinfeld.
It's like the two face of Saturn's moons, and it's
it's crazy to behold, and it's been crazy for scientists
to try and figure out exactly why this is getting

(18:20):
too shortly. Mentioning two face, It's it's monstrous in more
than one way in appearance. Yeah, that's right. It also
has an equatorial ridge, which is a chain of six
mile or ten kilometer high mountains, and this is wonderful.
It it might have formed during a high speed rotation
period or most exciting at all of all, it might
be a collapsed ring. No, you're making that up. No,

(18:43):
that's one of the theories, collapsed ring. Yeah. These are
essentially like the collapsed ring mountains, which sounds like a
perfect It sounds like something out of a Jack Vance novel,
you know. So it could have had a ring that
was drawn into the planet by gravity, collapse into it
and became this planet wide ridge of mountains that looks
like a horror movie monster backbones sticking up out of

(19:06):
the planet's flesh. It's crazy, a killer now it it
orbits at a little over two million miles or three
million kilometers away from Saturn, and it has probably and
this has probably protected it from tidal forces and melting
episodes that would have resurfaced it. So it's far enough
away from Saturn that that Saturn's gravity is not warping

(19:30):
it too much. It's not heating it and causing the
geological activity exactly. But you do have the strange dark
and white side, and um there have been three major
theories over the years as to why one side is
black and the other is white. Hit me all right.
So one theory is that i Appetus maybe sweeping up
particles from the more distant dark moon phobe and steadily

(19:54):
renewing this dusting to cover up all but the newest craters. Okay,
it's one sability. Another one is that I saw volcanism
may be distributing the dark materials. We're talking of volcano
like eruptions of hydrocarbons, perhaps to due to chemical reactions
that are in turn caused by solar radiation. So you've

(20:15):
got a planet that's half covered in soot sort of. Yeah.
Now the third theory then, this is the one that's
that is backed up by a lot of data from
two thousand seven's uh Cassini fly by, and that is
that thermal segregation is going on. So what is that? So, yeah,
the salad works. It takes the Moon as long as

(20:35):
seventy nine days to rotate around Saturn, and it's some
dark material made its way to the Moon at some
point in the past, perhaps dude tying into one and
to the first theory, Um, then the long periods of
solar exposure on the dark side would have caused the
dark material to heat up and volatile icy materials within

(20:56):
the dark to sublime out and retreat to colder regions.
The bright regions become brighter and the dark regions get darker. Okay,
so sort of a slow attrition. Yeah, okay. So Yeapitus
is a fairly small world, right, it's about one seven
the mass of Pluto, about the width of Earth's moon.
But what is the life potential? I want to know.

(21:17):
That's our main question with all these right, Yeah, yeah,
that's certainly that's the one thing we want to know
on each of these, is it possible that there's some
sort of life clinging to this little moon. Now we
know that the planet itself is probably alive, and it's
a curled up movie monster that's going to unfurled with
its backbone finally sinking in as it stretches its back

(21:37):
out and raises its claws. But assuming that's not the case,
and it's just a rock in space, what we Yeah,
what's the hope that there's life on it? A very
very little, very little hope for life here. Despite the
insistence by various UFO groups that there are domed cities
or other such constructions here. But well, if you look
closely enough and you want it enough, you can find

(21:58):
dumb cities and just about any world. Ain't that always
the case? Uh? Could we put a colony there though,
if it were entirely self contained and we had the
you know, the necessary technology, of course, possibly, But you
get down to the fact that there are worse and
better places to consider in the neighborhood. But it wouldn't
be like trying to put a colony on Io or something.

(22:20):
No items like you could do it, but they're better
places Interestingly enough, this world is the location of the
monolith in the original novel two thousand one of Space Odyssey.
Oh so not wait, hold on the modelith the monolith
on Earth's moon or the monolith on Jupiter in orbit
around Jupiter. Right in the movie that it's in orbit

(22:40):
around Jupiter, but in the book it was Saturn. But
in making two dozen one Space odyestly they couldn't get
the models to look right for Saturn's rings, so they
changed it to Jupiter. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Uh,
it's interesting to look at the the media, the fictional
attention that had has gone to Saturn versus Jupiter, and

(23:02):
I feel like Saturn is often it's almost like Saturn
is the heaven of our science fiction dreams of our
future Solar system, and Jupiter is more the hell Jupiter,
or at least the limbo. Yeah, like Jupiters, where you
have the Jovian moons. That's where you put weird bases
and weird weird colonies and mining colonies and maybe prisons. Saturn,

(23:26):
for the most part, it seems like there's a lot
of dreamy or stuff going on there. Yeah, maybe that's
just me that's my my read on some of the
examples I was looking at. No, it is dreamy. You're
exactly right. I mean we mentioned that earlier. It's the
Saturn imagery throughout popular culture and art and everything. It's
very serene, very dreamy, very pretty, kind of quiet silver

(23:49):
light in the background of space. Now we're gonna do
a quick fly by of the next moon because it
doesn't seem like there's a whole lot to see there,
but it is worth pointing out as a strange landmark
in the sphere of Saturn, and that's the moon Hyperion. Yes, Hyperion,
despite its wonderful name, despite whatever whatever you might expect

(24:09):
of it, based on Dan Simon's Wonderful Hyperion books, which would,
by the way, do not take place on this Hyperion.
I think it's alluded that a distant exoplanet named Hyperion
is colonized by individuals who are originally somehow tied to
Hyperion in our Solar system, but totally different things. Because
Hyperion in our Solar System, as it orbits around Saturn,

(24:34):
is essentially a giant potato. Yeah, it's an irregular shaped
and it's very small, about a one point one times
the mass of Earth's atmosphere, not Earth, but the gas
in the atmosphere, about ten percent the width of Earth's moon.
It's not very big, and it's shaped very strangely, like
a like a spongy low density sweet potato. Yeah. I've

(24:57):
seen it described as a large frozen double pile. Uh.
It's it's the largest of Saturn's irregular, non spherical moons,
and it's probably the remnant of a larger moon that
was destroyed by a major impact. So this is just
a junk, man, this is a rubble moon. We're not
gonna land there. There's certainly nothing, no life to consider here,

(25:19):
but it's kind of worth the point out as we
continue our journey towards a far more interesting um planetary object. Yeah.
Do you hear that sound? I think we're I think
we're coming in. Now, what is that sound? It's signaling
the Titans there. So Titan Titan is about the mass

(25:39):
of Mercury, about one point eight times the mass of
Earth's moon, about a hundred and fifty percent of the
width of the moon, the Earth's moon. Uh, it's spherical, obviously,
and it's Saturn's largest moon, larger than the planet Mercury
and this is the only moon that we're discussing today
that has been explored by a land ender, by a

(26:01):
human made lander, the Hohygan's Heightened Lander, a beast of
planetary exploration. There are videos available online that show the
landing imagery sent back by the Hygan's probe. You should
watch them, but try to imagine a tighten landing what
this world is like. Unlike so many of the moons
that we've surveyed before, this approach is very unique in

(26:22):
the Solar System. On Titan, we descend from orbit through
a thick, cold atmosphere and everything below is shrouded from
our view from space by this murky haze, and you
descend through the freezing fog and strong winds shake your
landing craft. Yeah, this is the only moon in our
Solar System that has clouds in a dense atmosphere, mostly

(26:46):
nitrogen and methane. And the atmospheric pressure is is about
greater than Earth, so roughly the same as you would
find at the bottom of a swimming pool. That's right,
But that's actually so that's heavy sounding to us like you.
You wouldn't want to spend your life at the bottom
of a swimming pool, but it's tolerable. It's tolerable compared

(27:06):
to almost everywhere else in the Solar System. Venus. Yeah,
so in Venus you might have what like nine atmospheres
or something like that. It's yeah, you couldn't survive. Uh.
And then other places there's almost no atmosphere, atmosphere pressure
to speak of. It's nearly like being in a vacuum.
Titan is close. Yeah, this is the Goldilocks finding the

(27:27):
bed or the porridge that is. It's not ideal, but
in a pinch my ears, but I can survive. But
so you land on Titan, You land in the middle
of an equatorial desert, and there's a strange sound and
tactle sensation you experience upon touchdown, not a dry thud

(27:48):
like hitting rock, but a splat, the sound of the
soil that you're landing on being wet. Welcome to bog World. Now,
it's maybe not exactly fair to say bog world, because
the soil isn't as wet as the mud you'd find
in many bogs on Earth, but relative to the rest

(28:09):
of the Solar System, it's bog world. Titan is bog world,
and as far as we know, Titan is the only
place in the Solar System other than Earth that has beaches.
Some planets have subterranean oceans covered in ice a rock, right,
We've talked about that. Some have frozen polar water ice
or frozen ice surfaces entirely, But Titan has liquid lakes

(28:34):
on a terrestrial surface. However, those lakes are not the
water lakes we know and love. Titan has a hydro
carbon hydrological system, which translates to seas and rivers of
liquid methane. So in the equatorial region there's this vast
desert of ancient water waterways, ancient river beds, and dried

(28:55):
up coastlines, and towards the poles you'll come across clouds
and storms and methane lakes. Now, Titan itself is it's
it's mass is composed mainly of water in the form
of ice and rocky material. In fact, Titan is so
cold negative trees fahrenheit or negative celsius that water essentially

(29:17):
acts like rock and lava too on our world. So
the ground you walk on, I guess it's ice mostly,
but it is water water ice that acts like rock. Yeah,
So it's it's crazy to think about that that it's
this this it sounds like an alternate dimension where everything
is a little skewed instead of instead of motions of water,

(29:38):
it is it's it's this other substance. And uh and
and the rock is actually water. It's like everything's turned
on its head in topsy turvy. Totally true. And that's
actually something that's covered in a fantastic lecture that I
listened to given in two thousand eleven by the Nasive
planetary scientists Christopher McKay about the possibility of life on Titan.

(30:00):
And Uh. I listened to this lecture. I thought it
was great, and I just wanted to cover some of
the things he talks about and maybe we can have
a discussion about what they mean. But so in this
Christopher McKay lecture, he begins by noting a curious fact.
So several years back, we had detected that titans atmosphere
features a hydrogen flux towards the surface. That means there's

(30:23):
hydrogen in the atmosphere and it appears to flow down
to the ground and then not come back up. So
what's happening to the hydrogen on the surface of Titan.
We will come back to that question. So McKay talks
about how all forms of life needs some way of
harnessing energy. So on Earth there are two primary strategies.

(30:45):
You've got like photosynthesis, right, capturing sunlight energy, and then
you've got chemical energy redox chemical energy. So life also
needs several other things. It needs carbon, you know, organic
molecules to make it tissues out of for food and
stuff like that. And it needs liquid water. I've already
discussed why that's a little problematic here exactly. So there

(31:09):
is gonna be no liquid water, and the main constraint
on an environment being able to host life on Earth
is the absence of liquid water. You can mess with
all the other variables, and as long as there's liquid
water there, there's still probably going to be something alive.
This is why world's with some form of liquid water.
Sort of. The hot spots of Solar system astrobiology investigation

(31:31):
like Europa Enceladus, another moon of Saturn will get to
in a bid, and the recently discovered spongy wet spots
that appear seasonally on Martian soil. I don't know if
you've read about that, but it's pretty cool, uh that
they found that, you know, there's some parts of the
soil on Mars that seemed to thaw seasonally. So even
if there's just occasionally liquid water, there's more hope than

(31:54):
than this world of Titan, which seems to just be
ever in the freezer. Yeah, but McKay point out something interesting.
It's not necessarily the compound H two O itself. That's
important because there are plenty of worlds full of completely
frozen water ice that that don't seem to be good
candidates for for life. Life is ultimately a subset of chemistry.

(32:16):
It's biochemistry, and that chemistry needs a liquid medium to
take place in. Liquid is sort of like the canvas
on which you you know, paint the wonderful artistry of
complex chemistry. So maybe it's not water that's the key.
It's just liquid. It's the liquid phase of matter. So
how about those methane lakes on Titan. In many ways,

(32:39):
Titan is analogous to Earth. So Christopher McKay points out that,
like Earth, that has a nitrogen based atmosphere. And if
you're saying, wait a second, I thought we had an
oxygen atmosphere, oxygen is only about our atmospheric composition, about
seventy eight percent of our atmosphere is nitrogen, and if
our atmosphere were entirely oxygen, this would be a problem

(33:00):
for you at high concentrations at regular atmospheric pressure, oxygen
pure oxygen's toxic. It'll destroy your lungs. As we mentioned,
it has roughly comparable atmospheric pressure. Mackay compares it to
being under fifteen feet of water. That sounds about right,
compared to what you said right being at the bottoms.
So it's not like Venus, it's not like Mars. It's

(33:22):
it's not you know, it's not the nicest place to
be compared to what we're used to on Earth, but
it's closer to Earth than anything else we're aware of.
It has a hydrological cycle with clouds and rain storms.
Now this is crazy. Yeah, I I don't usually think
of anywhere except Earth having rain. Yeah, and here we're
talking about what methane rains. I say, yeah, methane, of course,

(33:45):
So the methane is going to be H four raining
down from the sky. And speaking of methane, Titan is
rich with organic compounds. Now this doesn't mean stuff that
we know to be alive or organic compounds are just
a sort of group name for carbon based com pounds
like methane that are very often associated with life, but
they exist independent of life. You don't have to have

(34:06):
life to make them, but if you want carbon based
life to exist, these compounds need to be around. But
the biggest difference is temperature, right, So average Earth temperature
is almost two hundred degrees c integrated more than average
Titan temperature. So it's like a cold twin of Earth.
All this stuff that you see going on on Earth,

(34:29):
you know, the hydrological cycle, the chemistry of the atmosphere,
all that kind of stuff sort of has a cousin
that happens on Titan. But it's the freezing cousin. It's
the much colder cousin. And that kind of makes you
wonder if one of Earth's main features, life also has
a cold cousin. So this is a situation where we're

(34:52):
forced to to not dream of an entirely different form
of life, but to say life as we know it
existing a slightly different world like but basically all things
being equal, if the parameters were skewed a little bit,
could a similar model of life still exists, Well, it'd
be life as we know it in one way but
not in another. So it would be carbon based life.

(35:15):
So it's life as we know it in that sense,
and we don't know of any other way that you
could possibly build life, you know, without carbon, though it
could be possible, we just don't know. Um. But it
is completely unlike Earth life in that all Earth life
is water based, and this would be methane based, so
it would be it would be completely alien biochemistry in

(35:38):
that sense, but not in the sense that we'd still
have to imagine it's based on carbon, because carbon is
the only chemical basis we can think of for building
up the kind of complex molecules that we see in life.
So what did the the Huygens probe find when it
landed on Titan. Did it find microbes? You can guess no,
because we would have heard about that, But it wasn't
equipped to find microbes. There could have been microbes there

(36:01):
and it wouldn't have known. It's not like it came
back so exactly. Um. And that might be a problem
if it did, because as as we now know, it's
very important to protect Earth from alien microbes. But a
little bit about the science behind the Huygens probe. So
we when we sent the Huyggans probe to uh to Titan,

(36:23):
we built it sort of like a raft, as a
floating boat like craft, because scientists thought that Titan was
going to be covered in a in a surface wide
liquid ocean of methane. And the reason for this is
because they were able to detect previously that the atmosphere
was rich in methane. And atmospheric methane doesn't last forever.

(36:44):
It gets slowly destroyed by radiation from the Sun and
transformed into other compounds. So you can't have a methane
atmosphere that just hangs around for the entire lifetime of
a planet, you know, four billion years or however old
it is since Titan was formed, so there has to
be something on the surface to replenish it. And from
this they reasoned, it looks like there's liquid methane on

(37:05):
the surface of Titan which is slowly evaporating being processed
turned into atmospheric methane gas. And so they thought, okay,
we'll drop a boat into these methane lakes and we'll
see what happens. But instead of dropping into lakes, it
dropped into the equatorial region of Titan, which was something
more like a desert, but the probe was able to
detect that it was not as totally desert like as

(37:28):
it first seemed. As we mentioned before, the ground is soft, soft,
and damp, moist soil, and one instrument was also able
to notice that methane steam was coming out of the
soil where the relatively hot spacecraft was sticking into it. Okay,
so if there's liquid all throughout the soil, this liquid

(37:49):
methane throughout the soil on Titan, that seems like an
analogy to what we experience on Earth, where pretty much
anywhere there is moisture of any kind you can find life.
By by analogy, it seems like if there's life on Titan,
we should be able to find it all over the place,
even in the desert. Yeah, even in the desert, because
even in deserts on Earth, if there you know, there's

(38:12):
any water content whatsoever present, you're going to find some
kind of life. So in his lecture, Mackay asks, Okay,
so if there's carbon based life on Titan that lives
in liquid methane instead of liquid water, how would we
be able to look for clues of this? And one
one clue is looking at atmospheric engineering. So you've probably
read about how in looking for exoplanets, they've theorized that

(38:33):
one way we could look for life on exoplanets is
by looking for oxygen, right, because the presence of anomalous
oxygen is a sign of geoengineering by organisms, Like our
atmosphere is not oxygen because of the physics of planetary formation.
That wasn't it wasn't like that when Earth was formed. Uh,
Earth's atmosphere is oxygen because it's full of critters like

(38:56):
plants and cyanobacteria. Organisms change the atmosphere of our planet exactly.
It's their waste, it's their waste products, their poop, you know.
So they there or I guess they're they're breathing out.
I don't know, however you want to phrase it. They
take in sunlight and CEO two. They use the energy
from the sunlight to split up the CEO two, make
body parts out of the carbon, and then spit out

(39:17):
the oxygen as a waste product. And so you could
look at the original oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere. Is this
mass poisoning event We just happen to be the kinds
of animals that evolved to thrive amidst this mass poisoning
and to work well with it. So how can we
look for similar clues on Titan. Well, you would have

(39:39):
to imagine what an organism that gets along in liquid
nitrogen to do to make a living. So you imagine
a carbon based life form that lives in liquid methane
and imagine how does it eat? What does it do? Well?
Titan has tons of compounds on it that make perfectly
good food. One one example would be acetylene, or another
would be ethane. So if you're an organism on Titan,

(40:01):
food is just all over the place. In McKay's words,
food is quote falling from the sky. It's not not
hard to get a meal there. But organisms like us
get energy by a combination of eating food. So taking
in these carbon based compounds and then breathing, taking an oxygen,
and then reacting that carbon and oxygen to create usable
energy and the molecules we need and the waste product

(40:24):
of CEO two. Our cold counterparts on Titan could perform
a pretty much analogous process by reacting carbon based compounds
and food with instead of oxygen hydrogen, and that would
create usable energy and then a waste product containing carbon
and hydrogen like H four methane. Uh So, if there's

(40:46):
life on Titan, mackay and his colleagues predicted that it
would probably alter the chemistry of the surface by depleting
it of the compounds it eats and breathes, like acetylene,
ethane and hydrogen. And remember we started with that missing hydrogen,
so that there's hydrogen flowing down to the surface and
then disappearing. So the most fascinating possibility is that some

(41:07):
kind of organism at the surface is consuming hydrogen spitting
out methane as part of its metabolism and respiration, and
that's how it gets along. Now we don't know. This
isn't proof, right, we don't know that there's something alive
on Titan, but but it definitely makes Titan worth a
closer look. I think we should send more probes, right
most definitely, we definitely we should definitely send more probes

(41:29):
because one reason is always more problem. One reason, of course,
is that you know, if we find and this is
something that McKay points out, is that if we find
life on Mars or Europe, current life, pass life, etcetera,
there's a chance that it's related to us, right, But
when in contemplating Titan, this would be an entirely different form,

(41:50):
it would be it would be unconnected to us because
it would be based on a different biochemistry. Yeah, I mean,
there's no liquid methane based biochemistry on that and then
and there probably couldn't be because Earth is just not
cold enough. Like we look at at Titan and say,
how could you live on a world that cold? But
any life form on Titan would look at Earth as
like like we look at Venus. You know, it's just

(42:12):
this unbearable hell of intense heat where you know, the
stuff you need to live, the liquid methane you need,
just it boils. You know, you can't you can't sustain it.
So anyway, we mentioned sending those probes, what what would
they look for if we did send probes, Well, McKay
suggests one thing, look for evidence of the chemistry of

(42:33):
life there. So the example he gives is that organisms
on Earth we get oxygen easy, but nitrogen is difficult
for us to come by. So we have enzymes that
have to bust up nitrogen into molecules in the atmosphere
and make them into ammonia in h three. Now, on
a world like Titan, the problem wouldn't be getting uh,

(42:56):
getting nitrogen making ammonia. It would be getting oxygen because
there's no sygen available except that which is locked up
in the frozen H two oh, the water ice that
makes the rocky ground of this planet. So you'd see
organisms with enzymes for melting water ice and getting that
oxygen out of it. Uh. And then another thing he
finally suggests is to scoop up organic material from Titan

(43:20):
and then look for biases in the distribution of organic materials,
you know, so looking for molecules that are appearing and
anomalous concentrations that wouldn't be explained by inorganic chemistry, but
would be explained if you're looking at a place where
the chemistry of the surfaces being processed constantly by life forms.

(43:42):
But the idea of life on Titan is interesting to
me because of how cold it is, So we know
there's a basic correlation between heat and metabolism, right, so
a life form that lives on Titan is probably a
very slow moving form of life, slow metabolism, slow life cycle,
slow evolution. And this kind of makes me wonder about

(44:05):
weird thought experiment extending out from this, what would intelligent
life that evolved on a freezing liquid methane world look like?
Because in many ways, I think our idea of intelligence
is heavily colored by speed. Right, So can you imagine
an organism that has as much technological and problem solving

(44:26):
intelligence as a human but does everything literally one hundred
times slower, but potentially living a lot longer as well.
So I mean, I guess it all becomes relative. Then
I guess it's it's just harder for us to contemplate,

(44:48):
Like I have a hard time imagining something that's not
a like whale sloth in this scenario, and then wondering,
and then it's even a greater leap for me to
try to imagine this alien ethane based whale sloth even
developing crude technology on this world. Like right, It's just
it's almost too much for me to fathom. I mean

(45:11):
sirens obviously, Oh yeah, well let us not speak of
the sirens of Titan. But I I agree with you
about the difficulty of imagining you know, the whale sloth
like um, And I just tried to do some math here,
like if a development happened in humans one million years
after the emergence of the species. Could you expect a

(45:35):
hypothetical liquid methane alien world that did everything a hundred
times slower to reach the same development in a hundred
million years. Well, that wouldn't be ruled out by the
age of the universe. But then that sort of introduces
questions about like, well, wait a minute, I mean, how
would you even get a complex nervous system. Because it
took life on Earth what like four billion years to

(45:57):
evolve from the first self replicating molecules to logical intelligence,
So would it take life on a cold planet four
hundred billion years? Uh? And again I'm just using a
hundred times faster or a hundred times slower as a hypothetical.
I don't know exactly how slower it would be, but
if it would take something like that long, we've got
a lot of a long time to wait before we

(46:18):
meet these slow moving organisms, because that's much older than
the universe. Yeah, and again, to say nothing of the
various cataclysms and extinction events that are likely to out
to occur in the history of any light sustaining, life
evolving world. So it might very well be on the
path towards creating this and then whammouh, some some body

(46:40):
uh in Saturn's gravitational system just crashes into you and
wipes everything out. Yeah, but then again, I also think
of a very slow organism as a very resilient organism,
you know, which is hard to put them down. Yeah
that you know the right comments, comments, strike the right
the right meteor and certainly do that. Has anybody ever

(47:04):
created a sci fi alien like that? I'm trying to
think of one, Like an alien that's just amazingly slow.
The ants sort of sort of like the ants. Yeah,
I'm I'm not remembering one off hand. They tend to
be this kind of alien would tend to be the
the the the marginally experienced alien in a in a

(47:26):
rather rich diverse pantheon of alien species like this would
not be your central character because they're so unlike humans.
This would be like the one character that you go to, uh,
you know, about halfway through the novel to get a
little elder inside. I guess, well, it makes me think
that there there'd be a great creeping menace because imagine

(47:48):
you colonize the world with some hundred times slower than
you cold cold liquid methane intelligent organisms, and at first
it doesn't seem like they're bothered by your presence. You
can live in peaceful harmony. But it just took them
a hundred years to decide that they were going to
destroy you. Yeah, they would play a different you know,
long term game. Uh. And so I certainly I have

(48:11):
encountered that in fantasy novels before, or what happens when
you have the great threat does not have to that
doesn't have to worry about the day to day, even
year to year. I can sleep for centuries and wait
for the game, the game board to improve and the
situations to favor it once more. So you know, you
could see a similar model, I guess, uh with you know,

(48:34):
interplanetary situation, interplanetary politics, and then the great disadvantage we're
always at we gotta go get the groceries. Yeah, so
they can say, you know what, we can lose the
next three hundred interplanetary elections. You know, for us, that's
just that's just a nap, it's small hyperions. One last

(48:56):
thing I want to talk about for and we mentioned
future probes going to Titen. Definitely in favor of that titan.
Last I heard was not the top priority for for
future missions, but it's you know, it's something that's being
discussed and there are some proposals. But one proposal for
future exploration of Titans surface is the use of a

(49:17):
type of robot that I think is really interesting. It's
been referred to in the press as the super ball bot,
but I I like the design of this. I've talked
about it on the other podcast I do forward thinking before.
But the robot design is a rover that's based on
what's called tin Segreti architecture, and essentially it is a
mobile robot that looks like a jumble of rods and wires.

(49:40):
So if you just made a tangled ball of sticks
and wires connecting them at the ends, that's what it
would look like. And it moves by tensing and relaxing
the wires, so it kind of tumbles along on the
ground exactly. And it's resistant to damage from hard landings
and stuff, so that this makes it an interesting to
sign for a planetary rover to explore. But I've also

(50:03):
always thought this would be a great design for a
killer robot in the sci fi horror movie, like just this,
this tangle of rods and wires and it's kind of cute,
it's kind of funny. It just kind of tumbles up
to you, but then it wraps around you and tense.
It's the wires and then you're in trouble. Well, you know,
it makes sense because there's at least one killer robot
movie that took place on the moons of Saturn. Saturn

(50:26):
three Um had Kirk Douglass in it. Oh, Michael, but Kirk,
this is the movie. You sent me the trailer too,
and it has Harvey Kitel with like he's he's looking
very slick in it. Yeah, he very Unharvey Kitel. Yeah,
he's he's not his least sleazy roll I think, and
the kind of Flash Gordon asthetic and he actually looks

(50:47):
good in it. Yeah, fair Faucet in it as well.
And that has a killer robot in it, not the
greatest killer robot from cinematic history. But you know, beggars
can't be choosers, especially when you're looking at films that
involve the Moons of Saturn. Joe, it looks like we're
coming up on Raya. Yeah, that's right. So Raya after
Titan Raya is gonna seem like kind of a let down,

(51:08):
Raya or Rhea. I've seen it, said Ria. Also, so Ria,
I don't want to downplay the beauty and majesty of
this wonderful moon. And so it's the second largest moon
of Jupiter, second largest after Titan. Of course, Titan being
the largest, is about one six the massive Pluto, more
than of the width of Earth's moon. It's spherical, uh.

(51:30):
In terms of life potential, there's not a whole lot
going on here. It's it's and the sort of almost
half lunicized sphere of water, ice and rock with relatively
low density. In many ways, it's comparable to the next
moon we're gonna passdone. And as far as surface features go,
it's got craters and it's essentially a serene, beautiful cold sphere,

(51:53):
cratered in silent and in a far on a far
lesser note, apparently the latest Independence Day and Dependence Day
resurgence involves at least a minor point about humanity building
at the fenced outpost here. So I don't know why.
Maybe it just seems like a nice boring place to
put all those guns. I suppose, you know, there's sort

(52:15):
of like a if you pronounce it ray uh. That's
sort of like ray ray gun. Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
That probably makes us as much sense as anything. It
makes a lot of sense, Robert, makes so much sense.
Let's spiral on in and move on to the next InterPlaNet. Yes, Dione,
as we mentioned, a small cratered moon mean radius of

(52:38):
about three five kilometers, and what we're looking at here
is a hard frozen lump with a dense core, probably
a silicate rock, and the remainder of it is is
just ice water ice. Yeah, a very fine ice powder
that's basically like smoke from Saturn's e ring can instantly

(53:00):
bombards Diony, and the dust from the e ring ultimately
comes from Enceladus, which has prominent guys are activity that
we discuss in a bet. Great wisps mar the surface
of Dionne and uh, these turn out these are actually
bright canyon ice walls indicating past tectonic activity, and these

(53:21):
ice cliffs could be a mature phase of the so
called tiger stripes that are encountered on Enceladus. Right, So
we're gonna talk about the surface of Enceladus in a bit.
But Enceladus is a is a younger, smoother kind of
surface but it does have these stripes along it. So
you're saying like, if if Enceladus were allowed to mature
millions more years, it could end up looking more like

(53:42):
some of the surface features of Dion. Yeah, this is
essentially the old boring uh inencellatus. But nothing nothing in
the sphere of Saturn is boring. No, no, not boring,
but the the the less interesting version of the same
lunar idea. I guess we are spiraling in faster and
it's something we've gotta acknowledge. Now. The next one is

(54:02):
going to be the moon teeth this or teth this
uh so teeth. This is about sixty five of the
mass of the dwarf planet series. It's pretty small, roughly
of the width of Earth's Moon, roughly spherical. There's not
a lot of suspected potential for endogenous life on teeth this,
uh and and teeth. This is composed mostly of water

(54:24):
ice with no real atmosphere. Is this frozen ice ball
tidally locked in orbit around Saturn. But the coolest feature
of teeth. This is something that I came across I
think last year. I was reading about this and I
I just love it. I'm not quite sure why. It's
just a surface coloration feature. But in July, NASA reported

(54:48):
that in enhanced color images from the Cassini spacecraft there
were a series of these arc shaped red streaks that
could be seen side by side parallel on the surface
of teeth Us, and it looks like Freddy Krueger slashed
the moon with his glove. It wasn't the first time
the arcs had been seen. They've been spotted faintly visibly

(55:09):
as early as two thousand four, I think, but this
was the first time they were imaged really clearly. And
it's fascinating because we were not positive at what causes them,
at least as far as I could find, and maybe
somebody has a private theory somewhere, but I I couldn't
find that these are explained yet. They they're probably geologically young,
these red streaks, because they cross over older features like craters,

(55:32):
But what created them and why are they red in color?
Scientists don't know. So there was a NASA JPL press
release from that mentioned speculation on that they could be
maybe exposed ice with some kind of chemical impurities where
they could be out gassing from inside teeth This, but
ultimately we don't know yet. All right, well, let's leave

(55:52):
this moon behind us and move on to uh one
of we've already uh discussed a little bit, and that
is Enceladus Une about the size of Arizona. Yes, could
fit within the borders of Arizona. Another way to to
imagine the circumference of this moon, it is not very large,
is that if you were to punch a hole in
the earth along the borders of the state of Texas,

(56:15):
you could drop And why would you want to do that? Why?
So down on it. But just if you were to
do it, take a cookie cutter Texas sized cookie cutter
punched out that part of Earth, you could drop Enceladus
through the whole. So, coming after some of the giants
we've seen like Titan and and Rhea, you might be
kind of underwhelmed by its size, But do not be underwhelmed,

(56:35):
because Enceladus is quite interesting. Yeah. One of the crazy
features here is that Enceladus has hydrothermal vents that spew water, vapor,
and ice particles from an underground ocean beneath the icy
crust of Enceladus, and the plume material contains organic compounds,
volatile gases, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salts, and silica, and

(56:57):
it's all expelled out to a distance three times the
radius of insult Us and at a speed of approximately
eight hundred miles per hour or four per second. It's
a continuous eruption that continually refreshes the Moon's surface. Uh.
And it cloaks the entire Moon in an enormous halo
of fine ice dust, which then in turn feeds Saturn's

(57:18):
ear ring, which we mentioned earlier. Right, So the ear
ring is this outer ring around Saturn. You've seen those
concentrated inner rings. That the ear ring is more this
great vast haze extend extending outward, uh from from Saturn.
And it's uh oh oh, it's cool. I love the
jets coming out of the south pole of this planet

(57:39):
feeding this. And there's an even cooler implication I want
to mention in a bit. But there's another striking feature
of Insulatus that you would notice long before your spacecraft
sets down if you're landing on the planet. Enceladus is
the most reflective large object in the entire Solar System.
It's like a bright mirror reflecting the sun straight it

(58:00):
into your eyes, and Enceladus may be alive, not the
planet itself as we discussed with the Appetus, but but
something within the planet. So Enceladus is believed to have
a rocky core surrounded by a smooth, high, highly reflective
ice crust, but in between them, evidence indicates the presence

(58:20):
of subterranean oceans, much like other moons we observed around Jupiter. Now,
I've seen claims of both global subterranean oceans and regional
regional subterranean seas positioned under the south pole um. But
either way, the ocean has started to become intensely interesting
to scientists, especially astrobiologists. Now why is that, Well, we've

(58:43):
seen examples before where these where these subworld oceans. I mean,
we have liquid water and then clearly we have we
have jets of it, we have we have activity going
on here, there's energy taking place, there's warmth and with
liquid and there, and there are important compounds as you
mentioned earlier, what's in those plumes coming out of the
southern pole polar region of Enceladus. Again, the Cassini spacecraft

(59:06):
detected organic compounds carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salt, silica, volatile gases. Uh,
that's good stuff. If you look on live, going right
down the list, checking off many of the key factors
necessary for life as we know it. But do we
know it? No, we don't. And that's the thing. The

(59:28):
Cassini spacecraft is not equipped much like the Huygan's lander.
It's not equipped to detect the presence of life, but
it can, it can look for clues. Uh So the
material and these plumes go all over the place, sometimes
it falls back down to Enceladus forms this filmy mist
in space which you mentioned, becomes part of Saturn's e ring.

(59:50):
And I'd just like to point out that if I
understand this correctly, if it turns out there is life
in the subterranean ocean of Enceladus, it's probably being spray
out in these jets. And if the jets become Saturn's
e ring, one of the rings of Saturn is a
graveyard of alien microbes spread hundreds of thousands of miles

(01:00:12):
into space. That is crazy to think of it that way.
It's crazy or it's awesome and it's creepy. Either way,
I think that's great. So much like Titan to do
the real exploration and discovery work about the potential for
life on Enceladus, we need another mission, got to get

(01:00:32):
back there. And I actually just recently read a piece
in Scientific American that was talking about one of the
people who's working on trying to plan such a mission,
the astronomer Caroline Porko. And this kind of mission obviously
is not easy to devise or or too fund But
best of luck to them all. Right now, Joe, as

(01:00:52):
we as we leave this moon and make our way
towards our next and final destination here our final object
of study, I do want to stress what you're about
to look at is not a death star. It's a moon.
It's not space station, it's a moon. Um, I'm talking
of course about Mimus. Then why are we called an
instructor beam. Well, we're gonna have some questions then for

(01:01:16):
for minus. But but yeah, it basically Mimus is big
claim to fame. Is it's just a frozen moon that
looks a lot like the Death Star from Star Wars.
It's got this big crater that looks a lot like
the weapon. What would you call it the crater in
the Death Star from which the planet destroying beam comes out? Yeah, yeah,
an enormous crater uh known as the Herschel Crater. It

(01:01:40):
is a hundred thirty kilometers or eighty miles. While it
dominates the landscape, giving the world's appearance the world an
appearance of a great eye. Uh. The crater covered Moon
is less than one miles and kilometers in mean radius.
It has roughly the land area of Spain. Not very big.
The not very big, and again, most of this visible

(01:02:02):
side is crater. It's not perfectly round either, more of
an an ovoid. The shape and it's a low density
suggest that it's consists almost entirely of water ice, which
is the the only substance we've ever detected on Mimus.
It's tidally locked. And this is crazy. It's it's believed
that the impact that created the Herschel crater probably came

(01:02:23):
close to just shattering it entirely. That's how because you know,
a crater that big on a world this small, Uh,
you know, it was just a hair away from just
breaking it into pieces. So should that have happened, would
it have become another ring of Saturn? Potentially? Yeah? And
I don't know exactly how the ring formation works, so

(01:02:43):
we don't know. I guess, well, um, if nothing else,
it might end up resembling you know, one of like
the potato moon that we mentioned earlier. You know, we
might still have a sizeable lump, but it would be
a lesser lump. It would be one of those, uh
those other lump moons that are not discussing in this episode,
you know, among the among the fifty three named moons

(01:03:05):
of Saturn. Now, one of the interesting things about Mimus, though,
is that it should experience more tidal heating than Enceladus.
And yet while that frozen world, as we discussed both
geysers and h and and clearly experiences internal heat, Mimus
is just an unchanging waste land of ice. Oh yeah,
we should have mentioned about enceladusts. I think I forgot

(01:03:27):
to mention that the the what is the energy source?
You know, why is there? Well, it's some of the
same explanations that we saw in some of the moons
of Jupiter. It's it's internal stress caused by the orbit
and gravitational influence around it. So it's got a not
perfectly circular orbit. There's some changing gravitational fields, and this
causes stretching and flexing inside Enceladus that leads to heat. Yeah,

(01:03:50):
a lot of kinds of comparisons are often made between
what we know about Enceladus and what we know about Mimus,
to the degree that some have speculated on the assability
of a liquid ocean in Minus. But it's such a
small moon again, the size of Spain. It's it's hardly
the best candidate. But yeah, you could say there's there's

(01:04:12):
still an outside chance. So that's the case. Okay, we
seem to be passing Mimus at this point. I guess
we were not trapped in a tractor beam. However, we
do seem to be moving rather quickly towards the surface
of Saturn. Now, Joe, Oh, No, Saturn, which one seemed
quite serene and peaceful and beautiful, uh, glowing moons and

(01:04:33):
it's it's frozen worlds and it's nice, you know, black
white harmony plant lunar body here, but yeah, I know
it's able to escape. If you notice that as we
get closer, Saturn is making a sound. Do you hear that?
It's kind of like uh in Raiders of the Lost Ark,
that scene where they zoom in on the box with
the arc in it and it's making that satanic miall

(01:04:54):
miallmy Allinois. I can't quite hear that. Over the two
thousand and one space honestly monolith coral arrangement. But that's
because I have headphones in listening to that. I always
listen to that whenever I move in closer and closer
to a large, scary planetary object. The folks, I should
let you know that while we were working on this episode,

(01:05:15):
Robert shared with me a fantastic mix that's sort of
like a Saturn influenced electronic music mix that Robert, You've
got to share this on the lange. Oh yeah, I will.
I will make sure that there's a link to this
in the landing page. I believe it came from the
record label Acacia. Uh. Definitely worth checking out. They put
out a number of cool, cool tracks and cool releases

(01:05:35):
over the years, including some stuff from the Weirding Module,
which is one of my one of my favorite musical
acts out there. This thing definitely made me wish that
there was a good John Carpenter movie taking place on
a moon of Saturn. Yeah. Yeah, we need perhaps we
need more John Carpenter space movies, that's what you're saying.
More like Ghosts of Mars, That's what I'm saying. Ghosts

(01:05:56):
of Mimus, Ghosts of Titan one for each get to
get ice cube on the phone and Jason Statham. All right,
so there you have it, Uh, the moons of Saturn.
So now you have both both the moons of Saturn
and the moons of Jupiter covered on. Stuff to blow
your mind. Now, there was absolutely no way we were

(01:06:18):
going to cover everything interesting about Saturn and its moons.
So there's tons more to learn out there, and we're
constantly learning more. Yeah. Yeah, so so feel free to
look into this and research it yourself. You know, you
should feel free. Don't let us tell you that that
you can't learn about Saturday on your own. But anyway, yeah,
we we do encourage you to do that because it
is a fascinating planetary system and all those moons are

(01:06:39):
great stuff. Uh and and I feel like we could
have gotten into even more about the rings sometimes. We
could probably do a whole episode just about the rings,
the ring moonlits and everything like that. Yeah, indeed, just
rings in general, because we could discuss other rings on
other worlds in our own solar system. So hey, if
you will have feedback you want to share with us
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(01:07:45):
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