Science Case 2.5 - Titan & Its Tholins: Problem Description

Titan's atmosphere has the property to produce organic aerosols all over the satellite. These aerosols have a major impact on Titan's climate and could also be interesting for astrobiology due to the so called prebiotic chemistry leading to their formation. But there is a little direct datas on the physical and chemical properties of these aerosols.

PAMPRE experiment (French acronyme for Aerosols Microgravity Production by Reactives Plasmas) aims to study the process of formation of these aerosols and their properties. The way of study is to produced these so called Tholins in our lab, trying to reproduce Titan's main conditions applied on a mixture of Nitrogen and Methane.

Produced Tholins can be studied after production by different analysis, both locally and by other teams. It can also be used as reference material for the treatment of experimental data of Cassini-Huygens NASA-ESA space probe dedicated to the study of Saturn's system, including Titan.