"What is the name of the new planet found this past spring that is similar to Earth, and is outside our solar system?"
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Origins and Functional Potential in Complex Prebiological Molecules: Titan Tholins and related Organics (2)
PI: Mark Smith
Laboratory synthesized analogues of tholins and complex organics will be prepared both through EUV/VUV photochemical reaction/polymerization and focused electron beam irradiation of Titan and the Early Earth atmospheric model mixtures. The EUV/VUV photochemical generation will continue to explore the dependence of wavelength in the largely unexplored region between 50 and 150 nm employing our reactor/analyzer with the synchrotron output of the Advanced Light Source. The e-beam studies will use the same quantitative instrumentation in our Tucson laboratory employing a focused electron beam tunable in the 50-1000 eV energy range. The analysis will focus on the full range of tholin constituents ranging from low mass volatile organics (50-200 amu) through nonvolatile polymers/aerosols (200-1000+ amu). Specific questions regarding the mechanisms of nitrogen fixation and their early products will be quantitatively addressed. Rapid on-line elemental C/H/N analysis will be employed to provide energy and chemical/physical mixture dependencies of N fixation while molecular complexity and chemical structure determinations will be possible using a combination of mass and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy ( 1H, 13C, 15N and their cross correlated variants) with a chemical insight not previously available. Detailed hydrolytic analyses of aerosols with definitive product analysis for the most facile hydrolytic centers will provide insight into the precursors to potential biological feedstocks in the Titan and Early Earth environments. These studies will also allow improvements regarding functional biasing within analytical tools which have been applied to tholin analysis as well as provide refined insights into models of complex organic development in prebiological planetary systems. This work will assist/support the in-depth analysis of Cassini/Huygens results, most notably retrieved from the Ion/Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) and Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) from continuing fly-bys and perhaps the Aerosol Collector/Pyrolyser (ACP) and Gas chromatography/Mass spectrometry (GCMS) data as it stands from the Huygens probe descent.
