NASA Sniffs Out An Aromatic Molecule In Titan's Atmosphere

Titan's atmosphere makes Saturn's largest moon look like a fuzzy orange ball in this natural-colour view from the Cassini spacecraft, captured in 2012. (Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

You may wonder what an alien world looks like, what its atmosphere might hold, whether its terrain is similar to Earth's or even if it holds extra-terrestrial life, but have you ever wondered what it might smell like? That's just what NASA scientists have done by coming up with a recipe to figure out the aromatics of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.


In lab experiments to simulate Titan's chemistry, the space agency's researchers have been able to classify a previously unidentified material that was discovered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.


'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,' said Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre.


Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer already detected the material around the hazy moon as it can make observations at wavelengths in the far infrared region, beyond red light. The spectral signature of the material suggested that it was made up of a mixture of molecules, so scientists went back to basics and started mixing gases up in the lab.


The idea behind these experiments is a lot like trying to figure out the recipe for a cake by eating a slice - and having some idea how to bake, of course. Researchers combine gases in a chamber and let them react. With the right gases in the right conditions, they should come up with the same products found in Titan's smog.


Of course, unlike a cake recipe, the challenge with gases are that the possibilities are practically endless. Titan's brownish-orange haze comes from a mixture of hydrocarbons and nitrogen-carrying chemicals called nitriles. But 'hydrocarbons' already covers a family of hundreds of thousands of molecules containing hydrogen and carbon that have been identified here on Earth in plants and fossil fuels, and many more could exist on other worlds.


Scientists started with the most plentiful gases in Titan's atmosphere - nitrogen and methane - but got no results to match the one seen by Cassini until they added a third gas. The team started tweaking the flavour of the recipe by adding from a subfamily of hydrocarbons known as aromatics, beginning with benzene and followed by closely related chemicals.


But the best result came when the researchers added an aromatic that contained nitrogen, giving them a spectral signature that matched well with what Cassini saw on Saturn's moon.


'This is the closest anyone has come, to our knowledge, to recreating with lab experiments this particular feature seen in the Cassini data,' said Joshua Sebree, lead author of the study and former postdoctoral fellow at Goddard, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa.


Now that they've come up with a basic recipe for Titan's haze, scientists can start narrowing the mix down to the perfect replica. 'Titan's chemical makeup is veritable zoo of complex molecules,' said Scott Edgington, Cassini Deputy Project Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 'With the combination of laboratory experiments and Cassini data, we gain an understanding of just how complex and wondrous this Earth-like moon really is.'


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