During its closest flyby of Saturn's moon Titan on April 16, the Cassini
spacecraft came within 1,025 kilometers (637 miles) of the moon's surface
and found that the outer layer of the thick, hazy atmosphere is brimming
with complex hydrocarbons.
This figure shows a mass spectrum of Titan's ionosphere near 1,200
kilometers (746 miles) above its surface. The mass range covered goes
from hydrogen at 1 atomic mass unit per elementary charge (Dalton) to 99
Daltons. This mass range includes compounds with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7
carbons as the base structure (as indicated in the figure label). The
identified compounds include multiple carbon molecules and carbon-nitrogen
bearing species as well.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The ion and
neutral mass spectrometer team is based at University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor.
For more information about the mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
