A NASA spacecraft sniffing the smoggy atmosphere of Titan has found traces of the chemical used to make plastic Tupperware boxes.
The robotic Cassini probe has detected propylene on Saturn’s moon – the first time this chemical has been found out in space. Titan is a thoroughly unpleasant world with a brownish atmosphere, liquid methane rain and freezing temperatures that can plummet to a frosty -180°C.
As if the place wasn’t nasty enough, space boffins now know that it is home to detectable quantities of propylene, which is a key ingredient in food containers as well as car bumpers.
NASA used Cassini’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) to scan the hazy atmosphere, measuring the heat radiation emitted as infrared light from the moon in a process that NASA described as being similar to “the way our hands feel the warmth of a fire”.
The first chemical the scientists discovered using the CIRS was propylene, which was identified in small quantities at various altitudes throughout the lower levels of the soupy hydrocarbon fog found in the moon’s noxious skies.
“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 describing the findings.
“That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom – that’s polypropylene.”
Full Report: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/01/nasa_find_tupperware_on_titan/