Hypervelocity Enceladus Ice Grain Analogue Production with the Aerosol Impact Spectrometer
Abstract
The icy plume of Enceladus discovered by the Cassini-Huygens mission contains a variety of material emitted from the moon's subsurface ocean, including complex organics of great interest to astrobiologists. Further study of their composition would be possible in future missions with modern techniques and technology, but its important to have a baseline for those instruments before launch. The Aerosol Impact Spectrometer, an apparatus at the University of California San Diego, can be used to create particles like those seen in the Enceladus plume in a space-like, vacuum environment. These particles can be used to characterize instruments in the laboratory that could potentially be used for future missions to the moon. One such instrument developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is being examined in this study.
- Publication:
-
EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019
- Pub Date:
- September 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019EPSC...13..353M