NASA now knows what Saturn's largest moon, Titan, tastes likes.
Researchers used a lab "recipe" to recreate Titan's chemistry in hopes of gaining insight into its smoggy atmosphere, a NASA news release reported.
"Now we can say that this material has a strong aromatic character, which helps us understand more about the complex mixture of molecules that makes up Titan's haze," Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said in the news release.
The material was first identified by the Cassini spacecraft using a Composite Infrared Spectrometer, which makes its observations at "wavelengths in the far infrared region," the news release reported.
The craft found the spectral signals of the material was made up of a cocktail of molecules. To simulate Titan's atmosphere researchers combined gases in a chamber.
"The process is like being given a slice of cake and trying to figure out the recipe by tasting it. If you can make a cake that tastes like the original slice, then you chose the right ingredients," the news release reported.
This can be extremely tricky because the options are "almost limitless." The orange color of the moon comes from a mixture of hydrocarbons (which are part of a family that has hundreds of thousands of members) and nitrates.
The researchers started out with the two most plentiful gases in Titan's atmosphere, which are nitrogen and methane. They then added a third gas, called Benzene and other r chemicals that are part of a family called aromatics.
The team believes the closest they got to recreating the atmosphere occurred when they used an aromatic that contained nitrogen; these results matched closely with data from Titan.
"This is the closest anyone has come, to our knowledge, to recreating with lab experiments this particular feature seen in the Cassini data," Joshua Sebree, the lead author of the study, said in the news release.
Now that researchers have gotten the basic "recipe" down they can work towards getting it even closer to the real thing.
"Titan's chemical makeup is veritable zoo of complex molecules," Scott Edgington, Cassini Deputy Project Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the news release. "With the combination of laboratory experiments and Cassini data, we gain an understanding of just how complex and wondrous this Earth-like moon really is."
