Evolution of Titan's atmospheric aerosol under high-altitude ultraviolet irradiation

Sarah Tigrine (1) , Nathalie Carrasco (2, 1) , Ahmed Mahjoub (1) , Benjamin Fleury (1) , Guy Cernogora (1) , L. Nahon (3) , Pascal Pernot (4) , Murthy S. Gudipati (5)

1 PLANETO - LATMOS
2 IUF - Institut universitaire de France
3 SSOLEIL - Synchrotron SOLEIL
4 LCPO - Laboratoire de Chimie Physique D'Orsay
5 JPL - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Cassini-Huygens space mission revealed that the chemistry initiating Titan's aerosols formation starts in the upper layers of the atmosphere (~1000 km). The grains then sediment until deposition at the surface. Despite all the data collected, the photochemical evolution of the aerosols between 1000 and 600 km is still unknown, especially regarding their optical properties. The aim of this work is to investigate the photochemical aging processes of those aerosols and how they interact with the VUV solar radiations. We put our results in perspective with the Cassini data for different atmospheric altitudes.

Domaines: Planétologie et astrophysique de la terre [astro-ph.EP]; Physique Atmosphérique et Océanique [physics.ao-ph]

Sarah Tigrine, Nathalie Carrasco, Ahmed Mahjoub, Benjamin Fleury, Guy Cernogora, et al.. Evolution of Titan's atmospheric aerosol under high-altitude ultraviolet irradiation. European Planetary Science Congress 2015, Sep 2015, Nantes, France. pp.EPSC2015-496. ⟨insu-01208368⟩