NASA Sniffs Out Titan

NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has put together a “recipe” they can now utilize to simulate the chemistry of Saturn’s moon, Titan. The scientists can now classify once unknown material uncovered by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in Titan’s halituous haze.

Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said: “Now we can say that this material has a strong aromatic character, which helps us understand more about the complex mixture of molecules that makes up Titan’s haze.”

Sanctioned by NASA’s Planetary Atmospheres Program, the team investigated the mixture similar to the way a chef tastes an entrée to ascertain the ingredients. They experimented with different combinations of gases under different conditions. In this way they were able to approximate the original mixture.

NASA sniffs out Titan/Image: LightsInTheDark

The challenge to the NASA group had previously been that Titan’s atmosphere with its dark orange hue could very well have been the result of any number of different chemical mixtures. Once they had exhausted all the possible methane and nitrogen combinations, the researchers chose to add a third gasâ€"benzene. At this point, it was simply a matter of experimenting with other options in the aromatics group â€" a type of hydrocarbon.

Carrie Anderson, Cassini scientist and co-author of the study published in Icarus note that the results were closely reproduced when the first two gasses were combined with a nitrogen-containing aromatic. Joshua Sebree, study leader, stated that this is a scientific first and this is the first time anyone has been successful at “creating with lab experiments this particular feature seen in the Cassini data.”

Their new mixture has given NASA a much better opportunity to understand the exact mixture of elements in the unexplored portions of the atmosphere of Titan. Scott Edgington of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory concluded that the “veritable zoo of complex molecules” will continue to provide researchers with a more detailed idea of “just how complex and wondrous this Earth-like moon really is.”

NASA Sniffs Out Titan