Material Properties of Organic Liquids, Ices, and Hazes on Titan

Abstract

Titan has a diverse range of materials in its atmosphere and on its surface: the simple organics that reside in various phases (gas, liquid, ice) and the solid complex refractory organics that form Titan's haze layers. These materials all actively participate in various physical processes on Titan, and many material properties are found to be important in shaping these processes. Future in-situ exploration on Titan would likely encounter a range of materials, and a comprehensive database to archive the material properties of all possible material candidates will be needed. Here we summarize several important material properties of the organic liquids, ices, and the refractory hazes on Titan that are available in the literature and/or that we have computed. These properties include thermodynamic properties (phase change points, sublimation and vaporization saturation vapor pressure, and latent heat), physical property (density), and surface properties (liquid surface tensions and solid surface energies). We have developed a new database to provide a repository for these data and make them available to the science community. These data can be used as inputs for various theoretical models to interpret current and future remote sensing and in-situ atmospheric and surface measurements on Titan. The material properties of the simple organics may also

The Next-Generation Laboratory Experiments on Planetary Materials

“…We have compiled the first material property database that is dedicated to the materials on Titan. The database summarizes relevant thermodynamic, physical, surface, optical, and electrical properties for atmospheric and surface models (Yu et al 2022). The simple organics data are compiled from over a hundred years of data in the literature and the complex organics data are compiled from existing tholin measurements and the collaborative comparison study in Section 2.2.…”