Casino meets Phoebe on Planetary on Planetary Radio. Hello everyone I'm Matt Kaplan. The Cassini Huygen spacecraft has had its first close encounter with Saturn, or rather with one of Saturn's moons.

The images and data collected from Tiny Phoebe are spectacular.

We'll talk about Phoebe and its much bigger neighbor Titan with planetary scientist Elizabeth Turtle.

Later you can join Bruce Betts and me at Legoland in Southern California as we give away some t-shirts.

First though, we'll hear what Emily has to say about the possibility of life on mysterious Titan.

I'll be right back. Hi, I'm Emily Loch Duwala with questions and answers. A listener asked, how likely is it that there is life on Titan?

On the face of it, Titan, Saturn's largest moon, doesn't seem to be a

promising spot for life. Its surface temperature is minus 180 Celsius, minus 290

Fahrenheit, far below the freezing point of water. But Titan's cold

atmosphere is rich with organic molecules, the carbon-based molecules out of which all Earth life

is composed.

Titan's atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen and methane.

In the upper atmosphere, these molecules are broken up by bombarding electrons from Saturn's energetic

magnetosphere.

The broken-up molecules recombine into more complex heavier molecules which settle down

onto Titan surface.

Laboratory simulations suggest that, over geologic time, at least 100 meters of organic

muck should have fallen onto the surface.

Could this stuff have made life on Titan?

Stay tuned to planetary radio to find out. I knew we had to have Elizabeth Zibby Turtle back on the show as soon as I heard

how thrilled she was by the new super-sharp images of Saturn's moon, Phoebe,

taken by the Cassini Hoogan spacecraft.

...