Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn, is shrouded by a thick organic haze that has puzzled scientists for decades as its formation and growth mechanisms remain poorly understood. Our team is pursuing a comprehensive investigation of Titan’s middle and upper atmosphere in order to uncover the key chemical and dynamical processes that give rise to Titan’s seasonally changing haze layers, thermal structure and circulation.

Cryovolcanism is an expression of internal heat loss via the eruption partially-liquid water from an internal reservoir to the surface. It is particularly important as a transport mechanism between internal liquid oceans or lenses and frigid surfaces that can be sampled and accessed.

Extensive buried water ice is known to exist in the martian mid-latitudes and forms both a resource for future astronauts as well a potentially habitable niche for present or past life. The topic of our proposed work is to better constrain the ice’s history, present-day distribution and purity.

Clouds, hazes, and dusts have profound impacts on the climate and spectral observables of nearly all planets both inside and outside the solar system. However, models for the formation and evolution of aerosols in solar system atmospheres, as well as commonly-adopted models for representing clouds/hazes within exoplanet remote sensing frameworks, sorely need detailed validation against ground-truthed data.