WASHINGTON - Saturn has always been the most alluring of planets, with its encircling rings and a gathering of 18 known moons with euphonious names such as Mimas, Enceladus, Iapetus and Tethys.
The Saturnian neighborhood is a miniature solar system that was visited briefly in 1980 and 1981 by a pair of U.S. Voyager spacecraft during their grand tour of the outer planets.
Now another American spacecraft, called Cassini, is poised to head to Saturn for a much longer visit aimed at giving scientists a better opportunity to study the ringed planet and its moons.
The Cassini craft will carry along a European-built probe called Huygens, which will plunge through the opaque cloud tops of Titan, the largest and most interesting moon of Saturn.
Titan is a frigid, forbidding place, but scientists believe it contains some of the same organic chemicals that existed on the early Earth just before primitive life arose.
By studying the environment of Titan, the researchers hope to learn more about how Earth evolved into a life-bearing planet.
"For all the superb research that has been done in laboratories, we don't yet know how life on Earth came to be," says Jonathan Lunine, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist from the University of Arizona.
So scientists are eager to look at a natural laboratory - Titan's atmosphere - where some of the early chemical steps toward life may be occurring. But they quickly add that there is little chance that Titan harbors even the most rudimentary life.
Because of surface temperatures approaching 300 degrees below zero, "Titan is almost certainly not the home of life today," Lunine said.
10-02-97
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