Laboratory Studies of the Formation of Carbon Aerosols on Titan

Details Laboratory Studies of the Formation of Carbon Aerosols on Titan Laboratory Studies of the Formation of Carbon Aerosols on Titan

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.4911r&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #49.11; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.486

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The atmosphere of Titan is composed primarily of nitrogen and methane. Active organic chemistry occurs in the atmosphere producing an organic haze. During the Cassini/Huygens flyby mission, aromatic compounds (e.g., benzene, C6H6) were detected in the ionosphere at concentrations higher than expected. Benzene is a required precursor for larger aromatic species (e.g., Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, PAHs) that may be part of aerosol particles. There is still debate about the interpretation of the results, and the implications for the characterization of the chemical haze, making it more urgent than ever to understand the formation and destruction processes of large carbon molecules in Titan's atmosphere.
Photochemical modeling of the production of complex organic compounds in Titan's atmosphere is not fully understood. The modeled chemical pathway strongly enhances the PAH pathway to form, as do laboratory experiments on forming tholins (popular analogs to Titan's haze particles). The recent Cassini/Huygens results indicate that given the observed level of benzene in Titan's atmosphere, PAHs may be a major pathway for aerosol production. This motivated our project to investigate the role of PAHs, and nitrogen-containing PAHs (NPAHs), in the pathways from gas phase molecules to organic aerosols, in the laboratory. Combined cavity ring down spectroscopy and time-of-flight mass spectrometry studies of the products formed in discharge experiments, that allow in situ investigations of the formation of large molecular species and their conversion process into aerosols, are performed in order to understand and quantify the formation and destruction processes in Titan's atmosphere. The data will be used to constrain photochemical models of organic synthesis on Titan. We will describe the preliminary results from these experiments to address the issues in the characterization of Titan's haze.
Acknowledgements: This research is supported by NASA SMD (Planetary Atmospheres Program). C. R. acknowledges the support of the NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP).

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