NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finds plastic ingredient on Saturn’s moon

In a first, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has detected propylene, a chemical essential for creation of plastic, on Saturn’s moon Titan. This is the first definitive detection of the chemical – used to make food-storage containers, car bumpers and other consumer products – on any moon or planet, other than Earth. A small amount of propylene was identified in Titan’s lower atmosphere by Cassini’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS), which measures the infrared light, or heat radiation, emitted from Saturn and its moons. Propylene is the first molecule to be discovered on Titan using CIRS. By isolating the same signal at various altitudes within the lower atmosphere, researchers identified the chemical with a high degree of confidence. “This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene,” said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, and lead author of the paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters.