Radiation Sputtering of Hydrocarbon Ices at Europa-relevant Temperatures
This study shows that the sputtering of hydrocarbon water ice leads to the production of mostly CO2, CO, and fragmented hydrocarbons. The onset of sputtered hydrocarbons is immediate, and quickly reaches a steady state, whereas CO2 and CO are formed more gradually.
It is found that higher temperatures cause more sputtering, and that there are some notable differences in the distribution of species that are sputtered at different temperatures, indicating local heterogeneity of sputtering yields depending on the surface temperature.
Experimental setup for the electron sputtering experiments of ice surfaces, installed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ice Spectroscopy Laboratory (ISL). Left: the vacuum chamber with electron gun and quadrupole mass spectrometer. H2O and hexane are vapor deposited on the top of the cold copper rod. Right: a photograph of the system. — astro-ph.EP
Sankhabrata Chandra, Bryana L. Henderson, Murthy S. Gudipati
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci)
Cite as: arXiv:2502.00257 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2502.00257v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.00257
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Submission history
From: Bryana Henderson
[v1] Sat, 1 Feb 2025 01:35:09 UTC (2,743 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00257
Astrobiology,
