Acid vapor weathering of Mars analog surface materials
EMSL Project ID
7999
Abstract
We propose an experimental study of weathering by volcanic acid gases under Mars-like atmospheric conditions on terrestrial analogs to Martian minerals and rocks. We intend to characterize acidic gas - mineral type reactions that are expected to occur and which may help explain the current surface composition. Our technique is tailored to enable us to easily investigate the effect of multiple wetting/drying events, UV radiation, varying H2SO4/HCl concentrations, and partial pressure of atmospheric O2 on acid-gas weathering of carbonates, rock-forming silicates, terrestrial basaltic glasses, and iron oxides. One primary question addressed by this proposal is: Can the composition of weathering products on Mars be plausibly explained by sub-aerial weathering with a volcanic acid gas component, without invoking a warmer and wetter climate? The answer to this question will have important implications for understanding the history of water on Mars. We request to have at our disposal SEM, XPS, and XRD analytical capabilities for a total time of 50hrs over 1 year. Samples will be inorganic and nontoxic, and will be mailed to the facility or hand delivered by the PI or the Co-I. Our experiments will involve wet chemistry synthesis in Lab 1430. We intend to 1) determine the extent to which Mars-like rock-forming minerals, glasses, and carbonates are susceptible to volcanic acid-gas alteration under Mars atmospheric conditions including UV radiation, 2) characterize the physical, chemical, and optical properties of any reaction products, 3) relate these results to optical and compositional information of Mars? surface obtained by NASA missions, and 4) potentially evaluate the rates for some of the reactions.
Project Details
Project type
Exploratory Research
Start Date
2004-06-16
End Date
2005-06-20
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members
Related Publications
@book{stein-harvard-2007,
author = "Christopher Alexander Stein",
title = "{Adaptive Parallel Computation for Heterogeneous Processors}",
publisher = "{Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University}",
address = "Cambridge, MA, USA",
month = "May",
year = "2007",
}
Lex Stein, David Holland, Margo Seltzer, and Zheng Zhang. Can a File System Virtualize Processors?, ACM EuroSys'07 Workshop on System-level Virtualization for HPC, Lisbon, Portugal, March 2007.