Investigation of Venus cloud aerosol and gas composition including potential biogenic materials via an aerosol-sampling instrument package

<p>A lightweight, low-power instrument package to measure,&nbsp;<em>in situ,</em>&nbsp;both (1) the local gaseous environment and (2) the composition and microphysical properties of attendant venusian aerosols is presented. This Aerosol-Sampling Instrument Package (ASIP) wo...

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Chi tiết về thư mục
Những tác giả chính: Baines, KH, Nikolić, D, Cutts, JA, Delitsky, ML, Renard, J-B, Madzunkov, SM, Barge, LM, Mousis, O, Wilson, C, Limaye, SS, Verdier, N
Định dạng: Journal article
Ngôn ngữ:English
Được phát hành: Mary Ann Liebert 2021
Miêu tả
Tóm tắt:<p>A lightweight, low-power instrument package to measure,&nbsp;<em>in situ,</em>&nbsp;both (1) the local gaseous environment and (2) the composition and microphysical properties of attendant venusian aerosols is presented. This Aerosol-Sampling Instrument Package (ASIP) would be used to explore cloud chemical and possibly biotic processes on future aerial missions such as multiweek balloon missions and on short-duration (&lt;1&thinsp;h) probes on Venus and potentially on other cloudy worlds such as Titan, the Ice Giants, and Saturn.</p> <p>A quadrupole ion-trap mass spectrometer (QITMS; Madzunkov and Nikolić,&nbsp;<em>J Am Soc Mass Spectrom</em>&nbsp;25:1841&ndash;1852, 2014) fed alternately by (1) an aerosol separator that injects only aerosols into a vaporizer and mass spectrometer and (2) the pure aerosol-filtered atmosphere, achieves the compositional measurements. Aerosols vaporized &lt;600&deg;C are measured over atomic mass ranges from 2 to 300 AMU at &lt;0.02 AMU resolution, sufficient to measure trace materials, their isotopic ratios, and potential biogenic materials embedded within H<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub>&nbsp;aerosols, to better than 20% in &lt;300&thinsp;s for H<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub>&nbsp;-relative abundances of 2&thinsp;&times;&thinsp;10<sup>&minus;9</sup>. An integrated lightweight, compact nephelometer/particle-counter determines the number density and particle sizes of the sampled aerosols.</p>