Titan's Aerosols and Clouds at the Huygens Landing Site

Details Titan's Aerosols and Clouds at the Huygens Landing Site Titan's Aerosols and Clouds at the Huygens Landing Site

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dps....41.3301l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #41, #33.01

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We present detailed simulations of the aerosol and cloud evolution at the Huygens landing site, validated against the optical properties retrieved by the DISR instrument [Tomasko et al. 2008: A model of Titan's aerosols based on measurements made inside the atmosphere, Planet. Space Sci. 56, 669-707]. Our results provide good fits to the observed particle size, density, and phase functions, which put further constraints on the aerosol mass production rate, the atmospheric mixing, the monomer radius and the aerosol charge density. The mass flux required to match the observations is 3.0 x 10-14 g cm2s-1, the particle charge density is 15 e/μm, while the atmospheric mixing necessary to reproduced the observed aerosol extinction profiles is larger than the profile retrieved for the gas species in the lower atmosphere. Furthermore, we provide an adjusted imaginary refractive index (k) for the aerosol particles that is able to reproduce the observed wavelength dependence of the single scattering albedo.
The pure aerosol simulation provides a good match to the observations above 80 km, while for lower altitudes the inclusion of cloud formation is necessary in order to reproduce the vertical extinction profiles and the wavelength dependence of the opacity. We include in the aerosol simulation detailed description of nucleation and condensation/evaporation processes that are also coupled with the evolution of the condensing/evaporating gases. We consider three condensates: HCN, C2H6 and CH4, which are able to reproduce the main observed characteristics. Between 80 and 30 km, the HCN-nucleated aerosols is the main opacity source, while below 30 km the contribution of CH4 clouds is becoming more important. We consider both ice methane and liquid CH4-N2 clouds in the calculations with the latter reaching to a sub-millimeter size. Ethane clouds have a minor contribution to the opacity and their size is of a few microns.

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