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Oxygen Found Around Saturn's Moon Dione
New submitter S810 writes "According to an article in Discovery News, oxygen was found by the Cassini spacecraft around Dione, one of Saturn's large moons. 'It is thought the oxygen is being produced via interactions between Saturn's powerful radiation belts and Dione's water ice. The radiation breaks the water molecules down, liberating oxygen into the moon's exosphere.' Hopefully this will open the door for more funding of research int the moons of Saturn and Jupiter."
aliens
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Research into the worlds and universe that surrounds us is always a worthy goal, certainly much more so than terrorising middle easterners for their fossil fuels, so stick your jutting lower lip back into your checkbook and contribute something useful.
Sorry, I left the valve open. I'll go back and get it.
The article states that some of the other moons might also have oxygen and maybe thus sports some form of life. I assume that's the point behind the statement in the submission summary. Though it is definitely poorly worded.
Hydrogen is much lighter so it either gets stripped away by solar wind or achieves escape velocity.
I'm not thrilled because it's old news. Europa was found to have a mostly oxygen atmosphere back in 1995. Just like Dione, that "atmosphere" is too thin to be useful at only 0.1 uPa.
Between Europa at Jupiter (water and therefore oxygen) and this, it looks like we have some great candidates for spacecraft way stations on the way through the solar system, ala Discovery One.
The obsession with "finding life" is a case of extremely misplaced priorities. It is a worthwhile pursuit, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be pursued but it should NOT be the primary focus of space exploration. Finding life in our solar system is not a particularly high probability and if you do manage it there is a fair chance its going to be microscopic, so making it a primary focus of your research effort is setting yourself up to fail. The longer you keep doing it, the more money you spend, and the longer you go finding nothing, the higher the probababilty the people who fund you, and the public in general, will lose interest in funding you.
Things like asteroid resource exploration or Mars colonization would be goals that would have tangible benefits in the long term, and would actually justify substantial R&D funding, especially as Earth becomes more and more resource challenged.
A pitch based on their being Oxygen around Saturn so its extremely urgent we go looking for life there rings like a desperate act of researchers wanting to get new funding. Its not a visionary pitch.
@de_machina
Oxygen can be a signature of life, because plants produce it.
Plants liberate oxygen, not produce it. As far as I know, only nucleosynthesis can actually produce oxygen.
And frankly, a lot of processes can liberate oxygen. As mentioned, water or other oxygen-bearing molecules disrupted by energetic particles or ionizing radiation.
Also I don't know the science behind it but just because all animals on earth need it is a bad reason to assume that all animal like life needs it (it is a common resource here so it is not a surprise that we use it).
Science fiction biochemistry seems to be in love with silicon as the base equivalent of carbon, and chlorine as the oxidizer, for instance But humans tend to look for what they already recognize. "It's life Jim, but not as we know it" is something between an epiphany and a punchline.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Stopping point in the future to pick up oxygen as we move across the universe?
Interesting idea, but not really a "stopping off point". If we visualise the journey to even the nearest star (aside from the sun) as a journey from Los Angeles to New York (2790 miles), then in terms of relative distance Dione is equivalent to an, er... "gas" station just over 100 metres from your starting point.
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