New Study Sheds More Light On Saturnʻs Moon Titan And Its Surface

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Researchers of Hawaiʻi at have been able to provide answers to key questions about the surface of Saturnʻs moon Titan.

They examined remote sensing data regarding NASA’s Cassini–Huygens mission to Titan—the only solar system body besides Earth with a solid surface, lakes and a thick atmosphere with a pressure of about 1.5 atmospheres at surface level.

Infrared view of Saturn’s moon Titan from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, acquired during the mission’s ”T-114” flyby on Nov. 13, 2015. Credit: NASA

Images and data from Cassini-Huygens exposed the existence of vast longitudinal dunes on Titan’s surface across the equatorial deserts reaching heights of up to 100 meters, close to the size of the Egyptian pyramids of Giza. Whereas Earth’s dunes are made of silicates or the largest class of minerals, imaging studies revealed that Titan’s dunes contain dark organics of until now undetermined origin and chemical composition.

The UH Mānoa team exposed acetylene ice—a chemical that is used on Earth in welding torches and exists at Titan’s equatorial regions—at low temperatures to proxies of high-energy galactic cosmic rays.

The researchers exposed rapid cosmic-ray-driven chemistry that converts simple molecules like acetylene to more complex organic molecules like benzene and naphthalene—a compound which is found in mothballs—on Titan’s surface. These processes also happen in the interstellar medium—the space between stars—on hydrocarbon-rich layers of interstellar nanoparticles.

“Titan’s dunes represent the dominating surface sink of carbon in Titan’s organic chemistry,”  Matthew Abplanalp, a current researcher at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake, said in a press release.

“Therefore, unraveling the origin and chemical pathways to form this organic dune material is vital not only to understand Titan’s chemical evolution but also to grasp how alike the chemistries on Titan and on Earth might have been like before life emerged on Earth 3.5 million years ago.”

According to physical chemist Ralf I. Kaiser Kaiser, “these processes eventually furnish the molecular building blocks not only for Titan’s organic dunes, but also for organics on airless bodies in general such as on Kuiper Belt Objects like dwarf planet Makemake.”

“The low-temperature synthesis of PAHs from acetylene ices represents a fundamental shift from currently accepted perceptions that PAH formation takes place solely in the gas phase at elevated temperatures of a few 1,000 K such as in combustion processes.”

These findings will have unprecedented implications for the next space mission to Titan. NASA aims to land a flying robot, Dragonfly, near Titan’s equator close to the organic dunes thus providing an in situ glimpse of potentially biorelevant organics at a frozen stage—boldly going where no one has gone before.

Paper

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff