Methane is flammable why doesn’t a spark set it off?
Titan wiki
My WAG is that they don’t have loose oxygen floating around; without an oxidixer the methane can’t burn.
Because combustion has three components, fuel, igntion source (heat) and oxygen.
Since the methane atmosphere is icy cold and doesn’t contain sufficent oxygen it can’t combust.
Jupiter’s atmosphere is 82% hydrogen, and it doesn’t burn for the same reason.
BTW Titan is not a planet
(still bitter about Pluto)
There was an interesting gimmick in an Arthur Clarke book(Imperial Earth IIRC) where someone on Titan had set up a torch effect, but instead of a jet of natural gas burning in oxygen-bearing air, as on Earth, it was a jet of oxygen burning in the hydrocarbon-complex atmosphere of Titan.
This should remind us not to set up our floating, oxygen-rich habitat bubbles on Titan.
Well, there may be lightning on Titan, which would be an adequate ignition source in the presence of oxygen. As you note, however, the lack of the latter prevents combustion.
Naw, we’ll be OK as long as we don’t have heat.
Though apparently lightning is not in short supply. And you just know somebody will sneak into an airlock to smoke an illegal cigarette, and just at that moment someone will ignore the telltale and manually vent the lock, and then we’re all done for.
I do hope we send another probe to Titan - some sort of dirigible, perhaps.
Could lightning be a source of oxygen in Titan’s atmosphere? With the immense energy in lightning dissociating oxygen from molecules?
Dissociate it from what? Looking at the list posted in the OP of gasses in the atmosphere, there’s none that I can see which contain any oxygen. There might be some water vapor, but not enough to make much of a difference. Any oxygen liberated by lightning will quickly become bound up again with one of the other gasses before the concentration of O[sub]2[/sub] becomes significant.
There was also an Asimov mystery where the murderer was an inorganic chemist who just got back from doing important experiments on Titan, and he set the explosive catalyst on a pure oxygen tank instead of the hydrogen tank, because he was so used to working in hydrogen-methane.
BTW, the molecular weight of methane (16) is substantially less than oxygen (32) or nitrogen (28). LTA craft are going to be that much less efficient in a methane atmosphere. Nonetheless, it is a possibility for exploring Titan. In theory, you could lift a balloon with methane in Earth’s atmosphere - I never heard of anybody doing it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody provided a link.
OK. I was think more along the lines of a transportation-sized balloon, not a toy balloon in a lab experiment, but it illustrates that the methane filled balloon floats.
Given the Titan’s atmosphere is 98.4% nitrogen, I don’t see this as an issue.
Whoops, sorry. Didn’t look closely enough.