Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA.
California Specialty Engineering, Pasadena, California, USA.
Astrobiology. 2021 Oct;21(10):1316-1323. doi: 10.1089/ast.2021.0001. Epub 2021 Apr 30.
A lightweight, low-power instrument package to measure, 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 (<1 h) probes on Venus and potentially on other cloudy worlds such as Titan, the Ice Giants, and Saturn. A quadrupole ion-trap mass spectrometer (QITMS; Madzunkov and Nikolić, 25:1841-1852, 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 <600°C are measured over atomic mass ranges from 2 to 300 AMU at <0.02 AMU resolution, sufficient to measure trace materials, their isotopic ratios, and potential biogenic materials embedded within HSO aerosols, to better than 20% in <300 s for HSO -relative abundances of 2 × 10. An integrated lightweight, compact nephelometer/particle-counter determines the number density and particle sizes of the sampled aerosols.
介绍了一种用于测量（1）局部气态环境和（2）伴随金星气溶胶的成分和微物理特性的轻型、低功耗仪器包。这种气溶胶采样仪器包（ASIP）将用于探索未来航空任务（如多周气球任务和在金星和可能在其他云层世界（如泰坦、冰巨星和土星）上持续时间较短（<1 小时）的探测器）中的云化学和可能的生物过程。四极离子阱质谱仪（QITMS；Madzunkov 和 Nikolić，25:1841-1852，2014）交替由（1）仅将气溶胶注入蒸发器和质谱仪的气溶胶分离器和（2）纯净的气溶胶过滤大气馈送，实现了成分测量。在<600°C 下蒸发的气溶胶在<0.02 AMU 分辨率下测量原子质量范围从 2 到 300 AMU 的物质，足以测量痕量物质、它们的同位素比值和潜在的生物源物质嵌入在 HSO 气溶胶中，对于 HSO-相对丰度为 2×10，在<300s 内测量的准确度优于 20%。集成的轻型、紧凑的浊度计/粒子计数器确定采样气溶胶的数密度和粒径。
