PASADENA, Calif. The enduring silence of the seemingly failed Mars Polar Lander mission in December has left the Red Planet mute, but this hardly spells doom for the future of extraterrestrial sound.

Bundled aboard the $165 million spacecraft, now all but certainly lost, was a tiny $50,000 microphone that was to have recorded, for the first time, the sounds of Mars.

Scientists hoped the microphone, paid for by space exploration advocacy group, The Planetary Society, would pick up martian sound bites, including the crackle of charged dust particles and the whistle of the planets wind.

But tucked aboard a planetary probe now wending its way to Saturns moon Titan is not one, but two microphones, both poised to record the sounds of another world.

NASAs Cassini spacecraft will jettison the Huygens probe, named for the 17th-century Dutch discoverer of Titan, in November 2004.

The European Space Agency-supplied probe will then make a 22-day trip to Titan, followed by a nearly three-hour plunge through its clouded atmosphere to the surface. The two microphones will listen throughout the parachute-buffered fall.

"What we are interested in seeing is if there is lighting on Titan, and if there is lighting there will be thunder and lots of sound," said Marcello Fulchignoni, a European Space Agency scientist responsible for one of the six instruments aboard the parachute-equipped robotic laboratory.

One of the mics will listen for thunder; the other will record noise made by the probe itself to measure the speed of sound at each level of Titans thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere.

Titan intrigues scientists because it is the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere, and a surface pressure about 60 percent greater than that found at sea level on Earth.

Scientists believe Titans atmosphere could resemble that of Earth billion of years ago, before life began producing the oxygen that now makes up about 21 percent of the air we breathe. Indeed, Titans rich abundance of organic compounds could be the same building blocks that were required for life to form here on Earth.

Furthermore, lightning in the thick clouds that shroud Titan from view could also contribute the energy that could prompt chemical reactions to take place, perhaps even sparking the precursors of life, Fulchignoni said.

"That energy could provoke chemical changes, and the abiotic could then become pre-biotic," he said, speaking in Italian. "Both chemically and physically, the atmosphere could be this primordial laboratory, like on the early Earth."

There is no guarantee, however, the tiny microphones will hear anything other than the whirrs and clicks of the Huygens probe itself. Once on the surface, the probe could last as little as three minutes, giving it scant opportunity to record anything, much less a thunderclap.

"And the problem is we descend for just 2.5 hours and at only one point [on Titan], so the weather there could be like it is today in Pasadena," Fulchignoni said during a recent sun-drenched interview in the hometown of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

But space can often be a noisy place and the mics might surprise scientists yet. Two of the Soviet Unions Venera missions to Venus carried microphones, where the acoustic devices picked up the sounds of electric discharges in the venusian atmosphere.

And NASAs Voyager, Cassini and Galileo spacecraft all carry antennas that have recorded low-frequency radio emissions associated with the plasma, or stream of electrically charged particles flowing from the sun. (The link at right allows you to hear the signals associated with the plasma interacting with the magnetosphere of the jovian moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, as recorded by Galileo.)