February 8, 2018
The Royal Society of Victoria Public Lecture – February, 2018
You can watch a recording of this presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41ml9gl53nk
The Cassini (NASA) mission to Saturn recently came to a spectacular end with the spacecraft burning up in the gas giant’s atmosphere after 13 years of close examination of Saturn’s icy moons and rings. The research of Dr Courtney Ennis and his colleagues concerns Saturn’s largest moon Titan, a world thought chemically reminiscent of an early-Earth, complete with extended atmosphere and weather driven by small hydrocarbons.
Here in the Titan sky, we have detected quantities of cyanide family compounds seasonally generated by sunlight. Although deadly to much life on Earth, these cyanide species could act as a source of life initiating molecules – such as amino acids and DNA bases – when exposed to Titan conditions. Join astrochemist Dr Courtney Ennis, who will discuss the implications of cyanides to the origins-of-life and present current work underway at the Australian Synchrotron, where a specialised experiment to mimic the Titan atmosphere has been used to recreate its cyanide rain.
