Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is unique in our solar system. Below Titan's thick organic haze layer, rivers of methane carve channels into an icy bedrock and flow into large hydrocarbons seas. Across the landscape, water ice mountains and extensive organic sand dune fields are simultaneously alien and reminiscent of Earth. Titan’s lake mottled surface and thick, organic rich atmosphere may be an ideal setting for life as we do not know it and there is certainly much yet to be learned about our own home from the study of Titan. NASA’s Dragonfly mission will explore the surface of Titan using a dual quadcopter and reveal the answers to many questions we have about Titan.
Sarah Hörst is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University where she specializes in atmospheric chemistry. Her research focuses on understanding the formation and composition of planetary atmospheric hazes, especially the complex organic chemistry occurring in the atmosphere of Titan.
Hörst received a B.S. in Planetary Science and B.S. in Literature from the California Institute of Technology in 2004. She started her research career studying Europa and Titan while at Caltech, then worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory after graduation, analyzing images of Saturn from the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) on the Cassini spacecraft. She went on to graduate school at the University of Arizona, where she studied the chemistry occurring in Titan’s atmosphere at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. After finishing her PhD in 2011, she was an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at University of Colorado-Boulder.
She is part of the Science & Engineering team for the Dragonfly mission to Titan.
Event DateTuesday, August 19, 2025Start Time: 1:00pm EDTEnd Time: 2:00pm EDT
Hopkins at HomeLivestream
ContactOffice of Alumni RelationsJoe LetourneauLifelong Learning(800) JHU-JHU1hopkinsathome@jhu.edu
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