"Space Tupperware" Discovered On Moon Of Saturn; Plastic Chemical Survives Titan's Harsh Atmosphere

Tupperware was found on on a moon, sort of. The bizarre "space plastic" was found in outer space. A NASA spacecraft found traces of household plastic in the atmosphere of Titan, one of Saturn's moons, as well as a bevy of other chemicals.

The Tupperware was discovered by the Cassini probe. Cassini detected propylene on Saturn's moon during a scan of the atmosphere; it's the first time this chemical has been discovered in outer space.

Propylene is an ingredient in food containers, car bumpers, and other human junk. However, the propylene on Titan was naturally occuring.

Any chemical has to make it pretty tough to survive on Titan-- it has liquid methade ran and temperatures that are as cold as -180°C. 

"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 Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of a paper on NASA's findings.

"That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom - that's polypropylene", he said.

Scientists used  Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) to scan the hazy atmosphere of Titan--and the first chemical they found was propylene.

"This measurement was very difficult to make because propylene's weak signature is crowded by related chemicals with much stronger signals," said Michael Flasar. He's a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space"Flight Center. He added, "This success boosts our confidence that we will find still more chemicals long hidden in Titan's atmosphere."

Voyager first measured the fog above Titan in a mission of its own.

Titan's atmosphere is composed of hydrocarbons, which are building-block chemicals in fossil fuels; it also has lakes of liquid methane and ethane. The hydrocarbons are created when the sun breaks down gaseous methane.

The find is promising, others scientists agreed.
"I am always excited when scientists discover a molecule that has never been observed before in an atmosphere," said Scott Edgington, Cassini's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"This new piece of the puzzle will provide an additional test of how well we understand the chemical zoo that makes up Titan's atmosphere."