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Project Progress

The majority of our laboratory work was focused during the Summer June – August 2014, during which one joint PhD student (Benjamin Fleury) and one masters student (Laura Selliez) from the collaborator Prof. Nathalie Carrasco’s group worked with Murthy Gudipati in conducting the experimental work. The focus of this work is to determine whether photons at longer wavelength could induce chemical reactions involving one of the most abundant unsaturated molecules in Titan’s atmosphere: acetylene when accreted on to laboratory generated “tholins and organic polymers” – analogs of Titan’s aerosols and surface organics. We were successful and observed consistently that acetylene is depleted during photolysis only when adsorbed on tholins. One publication for a high-impact journal is in preparation, involving Bob West and the Cassini team and two French teams.

During March-April 2014 Murthy Gudipati took various tholin samples, including the photopolymer from dicyano acetylene (C₄N₂) — which was the focus of our Nature Communications Paper in 2013 — to Grenoble to Veronique Vuitton’s lab to conduct their mass spectroscopic analysis. The results from these “orbitrap” mass spectrometry are very exciting. We could clearly see dimers, trimers of C₄N₂, further evidence for longer-wavelength induced photopolymerization in condensed Titan’s molecular ices. One publication is in preparation.