Feb 28, 2015 11:58 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Researchers from Cornell University examining Titan, Saturn's largest moon, have determined the rocky giant could support life, but "not as we know it."

Authors of a study published in the journal Science Advances took an "imaginative and rigidly scientific view" for their work, according to a press release. The researchers found that Titan could support living beings, but they would need to be able to live on methane instead of oxygen.

"We're not biologists, and we're not astronomers, but we had the right tools," study lead researcher Paulette Clancy, an expert in chemical molecular dynamics, said in the release. "Perhaps it helped, because we didn't come in with any preconceptions about what should be in a membrane and what shouldn't. We just worked with the compounds that we knew were there and asked, 'If this was your palette, what can you make out of that?'"

Clancy was joined on the study by first author James Stevenson, a graduate student in chemical engineering, and a co-author named Jonathan Lunine, director for Cornell's Center for Radiophysics and Space Research.

"Ours is the first concrete blueprint of life not as we know it," Stevenson said in the release, noting that inspiration for the study came from Isaac Asimov 1962 essay titled "Not as We Know It."

Lunine was a member of NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission that first discovered Titan's methane and ethane pools. They thought up a cell membrane that would be necessary to live on Titan and named it "azotosome," which would translate from Greek to mean "nitrogen body."

"Someday sending a probe to float on the seas of this amazing moon and directly sampling the organics," Lunine said in the release.

The researchers' next step would certainly be considered a long-term goal, as they would like to land a spacecraft on Titan.

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