This undated image provided by NASA shows Saturn's largest moon, Titan. NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected the presence of a plastic ingredient in Titan's atmosphere, the first time the chemical has been found in a world other than Earth. — AP WASHINGTON — NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found propylene, a chemical used to make household plastic containers, on Saturn's moon Titan, the space agency said. “This is the first definitive detection of the plastic ingredient on any moon or planet, other than Earth,” NASA said. A small amount of propylene was identified in Titan's lower atmosphere by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer, which measures heat radiation, the agency reported in Monday's edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. By isolating the same signal at various altitudes within the lower atmosphere, researchers identified the chemical's unique thermal fingerprint with a high degree of confidence, NASA said. “This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene,” said Conor Nixon, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the paper. “That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom — that's polypropylene.” The chemical is also used to make car bumpers and other consumer products. The discovery could help scientists understand the “chemical zoo” that makes up Titan's hazy brownish atmosphere, said Scott Edgington, Cassini's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Meanwhile, a portable radar device that can sense live victims beneath a collapsed structure was inspired by the same technology used to detect distant objects in space, NASA said. The prototype for the new tool was demonstrated for reporters by US space agency experts who are collaborating with the Department of Homeland Security. Known by the acronym FINDER, short for Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response, the device can locate people as many as 30 feet (nine meters) under crushed materials, NASA said. “The ultimate goal of FINDER is to help emergency responders efficiently rescue victims of disasters,” said John Price, program manager for the First Responders Group in Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate in Washington. “The technology has the potential to quickly identify the presence of living victims, allowing rescue workers to more precisely deploy their limited resources.” In open spaces it can reach further, detecting people at a distance of 100 feet (30 meters). Behind solid concrete, the device works as far as 20 feet (about six meters). The technology is more advanced than present radars, whose signals can be hard to decipher in a typical building collapse because they bounce off the multiple surfaces and angles. FINDER uses advanced algorithms to “isolate the tiny signals from a person's moving chest by filtering out other signals, such as those from moving trees and animals,” NASA said. A similar technology is used by NASA's Deep Space Network to locate spacecraft. “A light wave is sent to a spacecraft, and the time it takes for the signal to get back reveals how far away the spacecraft is,” NASA said. NASA's Deep Space Network also uses the technique to track its Cassini spacecraft as it orbits Saturn on a mission to learn more about the planet's rings. “Detecting small motions from the victim's heartbeat and breathing from a distance uses the same kind of signal processing as detecting the small changes in motion of spacecraft like Cassini as it orbits Saturn,” said James Lux, task manager for FINDER at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. — Agencies
