Speaker: Erika Barth (SwRI)

Title: It’s always a cloudy day on Titan

Abstract: Titan is unique among the icy satellites in its possession of a dense atmosphere.  While we’ve known that methane can form optically thick clouds visible to ground-based telescopes since the Cassini spacecraft was still making its way to Saturn, data returned from that mission as well as further ground-based observations have shown there is much more condensation occurring in Titan’s atmosphere.  Many of the trace gases created from photochemical reactions involving N₂ and CH₄ in Titan’s atmosphere become supersaturated in the stratosphere and are likely to form ices on the organic haze particles present.  I will describe the varieties of clouds we’ve observed in Titan’s atmosphere and my work exploring their particle sizes and composition through both detailed microphysics modeling of particles and larger scale modeling of convective clouds.

In-person only (Room 3)