The US space agency has finally identified the chemical composition that provides Saturn's moon Titan its orange haze.
Basing on material gathered from Titan's atmosphere by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists were able to experiment with combining gases in various ways and under differing lab conditions, and finally managed to approximate the initial mixture detected by Cassini.
Titan's atmosphere owes its dark orange color to a mixture of aromatic hydrocarbons. But when scientists exhausted all possible combinations with nitrogen and methane, it occurred to them to try adding a third gas – benzene. And that put them on the right path of figuring out Titan's smell, as they only had to mix it with some other possible options, all belonging to a subfamily of aromatics – a type of hydrocarbon.
When an aromatic containing nitrogen was combined with the first two gasses, this was the first success science has ever had at "creating with lab experiments this particular feature seen in the Cassini data," head of the study, Joshua Sebree, said.
The resulting mixture gives scientists a much bigger chance to understanding the precise mixture of gases in the unseen areas of Titan's atmosphere.
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