NASA and other space agencies are scouring the Red Planet in search of alien microbial life, but one expert believes Earth’s next door neighbour is not the place to be looking. Dr Sheila Kanani, education, diversion and outreach officer at the Royal Astronomical Society, has said that space agencies should be travelling to one of Saturn’s moons in the hopes of finding life. The Cassini mission, which travelled through the hydrothermal plumes of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s 62 known moons, revealed in 2016 that it could home the building blocks for life.
And Dr Kanani believes this is where humans are likely to find life, and would even be willing to place a wager on it.
She told express.co.uk: “I think, and this is just my personal opinion, that if we are going to find it in our solar system anywhere, it is going to be Enceladus. because Cassini flew through the plumes of Enceladus and measured what the plume is made from, and it has got all the building blocks for life.
“It has carbon, ammonia, sulphur, and all the ideas behind extremophiles on Earth – there are some that live on the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean which eat the sulphur from the hydrothermal vents on Earth.
“And we think the same processes are happening on Enceladus – plus it is a closed system.
“It is covered in ice so if there was anything living it might not have been effected by anything else happening in the solar system. I would bet money on Enceladus, but that’s my opinion.
“If Anything, Mars has had its day. Perhaps something happened on Mars before and we are just too late to see it.”
However, Dr Kanani has said there are major obstacles to overcome in finding extraterrestrial life forms, mainly funding.
She continued: “All we need to do is send a craft to Enceladus, drill through the ice and float around in the ocean.
“But at the moment I don’t think they can drill through the distances of the ice. People are testing the technology but we are not quite there yet.
“It’s not getting there, it’s some of the technology and how it would be different on a moon orbiting Saturn.
“It’s very close it might be in my generation, it might be in the next.”
Another of Saturn’s moons, Titan, has previously been touted as a possible home to alien activity.
In 2017, the Cassini spacecraft detected carbon chain anions – one of the main ingredients of life on Earth – on Titan.
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Scientists describe them as prebiotic meaning that they could be the foundation for life as with the case on Earth.
The chemicals were found in the moon’s atmosphere which has redefined scientists understanding of Titan.
Ravi Desai, study lead author and PhD student at University College London (UCL), said at the time: “We have made the first unambiguous identification of carbon chain anions in a planet-like atmosphere, which we believe are a vital stepping-stone in the production line of growing bigger, and more complex organic molecules, such as the moon’s large haze particles.
“This is a known process in the interstellar medium – the large molecular clouds from which stars themselves form – but now we’ve seen it in a completely different environment, meaning it could represent a universal process for producing complex organic molecules.”
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