US: Life on Saturn moon? Maybe

Could Saturn's cold, cloud-covered moon Titan host an exotic form of primitive life based on methane, in sharp contrast to the water-based life of Earth? asks Doug Isbell in the The Tuscan Sentinel. That's one amazing possibility implied by two new related scientific studies based on data from NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft.

But a leading astrobiologist from Tucson, who is a co-author on one of the two papers, says it's best to be cautious about such a potentially profound conclusion.

Separate peer-reviewed papers, published online this week in the journal Icarus and the Journal of Geophysical Research, found chemical processes in the atmosphere and on the surface of Titan that could be explained by an extreme form of methane-based life. This surface life would 'eat' the hydrogen that was found by one of the studies to be raining down from the moon's dense atmosphere, which is even thicker than Earth's. Meanwhile, other observations of Titan by instruments aboard the Cassini spacecraft found a distinct lack of hydrogen on the surface, suggesting that it is being transformed or consumed by some unknown process that could be either physical or biological.
Full report on The Tuscon Sentinal site