Titan s Chemical Cocktail

Dive into Titan s thick atmosphere and find out what a strange place it is, adapted from NASA s Scientific Visualization Studio. With its clouds, rain cycle, and giant lakes, Saturn s large moon Titan is a surprisingly Earthlike place. But unlike on Earth, Titan s surface is far too cold for liquid water - instead, Titan s clouds, rain, and lakes consist of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane (which exist as gases here on Earth). When these hydrocarbons evaporate and encounter ultraviolet radiation in Titan s upper atmosphere, some of the molecules are broken apart and reassembled into longer hydrocarbons like ethylene and propane. NASA s Voyager 1 spacecraft first revealed the presence of several species of atmospheric hydrocarbons when it flew by Titan in 1980, but one molecule was curiously missing - propylene, the main ingredient in plastic number 5. Now, thanks to NASA s Cassini spacecraft, scientists have detected propylene on Titan for the first time, solving a long-standing mystery about the solar system s most Earthlike moon.