Manoa Language and Culture Programs Receive $8 MillionAsian and Pacific Language Programs funded. Read more
KudosWest O'ahu’s Gene Awakuni, Chris Conybeare, Manoa’s Hazel Beh, Charles Booth, Sanjay Nadkarni, Randall Roth, Hilo’s Jean Ippolito, David Miller, Wayne Miyamoto and Ken Staton. Read moreNew BookManoa's Rebecca Knuth publishes Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction. Read more
Photos HighlightsUH's banner in Iraq, the staff at Leeward CC Wai‘anae and Manoa's carved pumpkins. Read more
UH EventsTed Kooser speaks at Manoa and Windward, Windward’s Take 5 with Nature exhibit, Leeward’s Arabian Nights, Hilo’s Jane Eyre and International Education Week, Maui’s Boteilho reading, Manoa’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Merwin on Bibliovision, Ying Quartet performance and Becker lecture and Kaua‘i’s The Lines Are Drawn. Read more
Manoa postdoctoral researchers, left to right, Ying Guo, Hibin Gu and Fangtong Zhang with the machine they’ll be using to simulate conditions on Titan.
Studying Titan’s Atmosphere
Manoa Associate Professor Ralf Kaiser is leading an interdisciplinary group of researchers to study the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. The study was awarded a five-year $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Collaborative Research in Chemistry Program.
Hydrocarbon-based atmospheric layers on Titan that have unique properties allowing for preservation of astrobiologically important molecules may yield vital clues on the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere a few billions of years ago. According to scientists, information gained from analyzing these molecules could also lead to a greater understanding of the origin and chemical evolution of the solar system.
Titan’s atmosphere is considered ideal for providing such scientific understanding because it offers the potential to reconstruct the scene of the primordial terrestrial atmosphere as Titan and proto-Earth are believed to have emerged with similar atmospheres from the Solar Nebula.