Cassini Space Cassini della NASA has acquired images to create this composite of the largest moon of Saturn, Titan, November 13, 2015. Credit: NASA
The largest moon in Saturn, Titano, is particularly captivating for scientists. This is largely thanks to its status as the only other planetary body in the sun system known to host an atmosphere about 1.5 times denser than the terrestrial one and liquid bodies on its surface. (Unlike the earth, however, where most of the surface liquid is water, Titan is so icy – about –290 degrees Fahrenheit [–179 degrees Celsius] – that the liquid present consists of hydrocarbons such as methane and etano.)
But even such a great moon lacks the mass to maintain a close grip on its atmosphere. Now, a new experimental research published on February 1 in Geochimica and cosmochemistry Acta It shows that chemical compounds in the Titan atmosphere could emerge from the processes within its interiors, offering a way to fill the thick atmosphere of the moon.
Mysterious Titan
When NASA sent VoyagerProbi on a large tour of the external solar system, he chose to send Voyager 1 to a special mission to closely examine the thick atmosphere of Titan. Twenty years later, NASA doubled this interest with the Cassini’s mission, which explored the Saturn system as a whole. Cassini also transported a dedicated Lander, the Huygens probe of the European Space Agency, which landed on January 14, 2005, in the Equatorial Region of Titan. Huygens has returned attractive data on this primordial moon, including a treasure of information on its often atmosphere that we are still unveiling 20 years later.
Related: As we landed a probe on the moon of another planet
But the Titan diameter is only 40 percent than that of the earth and has less than 2.3 percent of the mass of the earth. With this in mind, how can it retain such dense atmosphere, especially over the course of many million years? Mars is believed to be dry and sterile because the sun wind has removed its atmosphere at some point in the ancient past. So why didn’t it happen to Titan?
Kelly Miller of the Southwest Research Institute offers another layer to mystery. “One of Titan’s many interesting things is his very thick atmosphere, which is mainly nitrogen,” he says. “But it also has an important 5 % of methane. And methane participates in photochemical reactions (reactions caused by sunlight) which generate aerosol material, which sediments and probably contributes to the organic material that covers many of the Titan surface.”
But this process would have freed Titan of methane in its atmosphere only in about 30 million years. So how did all that methane blocked?
Inside
Fortunately, Miller also has clues about how to respond to this enigma. He led new research in collaboration with the scientists of the Earth Laboratory and the planets of the Carnegie Institution for Science which suggests a possible mechanism with which methane in Titan’s atmosphere has actually been reinstated by an internal tank.
“The data of the Cassini-Huygens mission show that there is Argon-40 in the atmosphere”, explains Miller. “Argon-40 is a potassium-40 decay product and potassium is an element that forms the rock. So, we would not expect it to be really present so much in the ice shell. It should be more present in the rocky interiors.”
With this in mind, the results of the experiments of its team, which show that organic matter within the Titan could interact with high temperatures (about 480 f [250 C] Or more), they indicate that cryovolcanism can be present on Titan. Researchers have been suspected him for some time, but the new research shows him as more likely than ever.
If the cryovolcans are pumping methane into the atmosphere of Titan from the inside, it means that there must be a process inside to produce that methane in the first place – a situation that also has other implications. “If this cooking process is taking place inside with this accumulated complex organic material, then it will generate other products,” says Miller. “Furthermore, it will not only be created with methane and carbon dioxide and those other products could have some implications on the fact that the ocean of the subsoil of Titan may be habitable or not.”
Hoping for answers
Of course, they still remain a lot to discover on Titano. To begin with, where did the water pelvis of the methane inside come from? This and other questions can be answered from the next Titan missions, including the NASA and the johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Dragonfly’s space vehicle, a nuco -propulsion nineteenth drone nuclear propulsion that will be able to fly from one scientific investigation to the other, is due to the launch later in this decade and will arrive in 2034. When it arrives, the seas of the Equatorial Duna of Titan will explore for evidence of what makes the moon as it is.
Dragonfly and recent efforts such as the Osiris-Rex mission to restore Asteroid Bennu samples, have shown the value of focusing our analysis on organic components in the external solar system and Miller expresses hope about what it means for the future of planetary science. “There has been a kind of explosion of interest for the community of the external solar system in this organic material and what people are discovering on these samples will continue to grow and really, really taking off.”
While laboratory experiments and robotic missions continue to advance our knowledge, it is almost certain that we will come to see Titan under a completely new light.
