Discharge in the Martian Atmosphere, Implications for Instrumentation and Atmospheric Chemistry.

Details Discharge in the Martian Atmosphere, Implications for Instrumentation and Atmospheric Chemistry. Discharge in the Martian Atmosphere, Implications for Instrumentation and Atmospheric Chemistry.

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.2421m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #24.21; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.458

Biology

Scientific paper

Electrical discharge affects both on the chemistry ongoing in the Martian atmosphere, potentially destroying methane and forming oxidizing agents such as hydrogen peroxide, and the operation of in situ instrumentation. A natural process creating discharge in the Martian atmosphere is the generation of electric fields by dust particle interaction in dust storms and dust devils.
In the era of in situ Mars exploration more and more sophisticated and technically challenging instrumentation is developed. One of the operational requirements for these instruments is high voltage. High voltages interacting with the Martian atmosphere can create electric discharges.
The high voltage interaction with a gas is described by the Paschen curve, showing the breakdown voltage as a function of atmospheric pressure, for a fixed distance over which the voltage is applied. The Paschen curves for various gases indicate that the minimum breakdown voltage for distances of 1-1000 mm occurs at pressures at or near the surface pressure of Mars. In order to better understand the potential risks to electrical systems operating on the surface of Mars, experiments were conducted to compare breakdown conditions.
We present experimentally measured breakdown voltage curves for a gas mixture representative of the Martian atmosphere and compare our results to breakdown voltages of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, helium and argon as measure with our system. The applied dc voltage when electrical breakdown occurred between two stainless steel spheres was measured at pressures from 10-2 to 100 torr in all gases. We tentatively measured a minimum voltage for the Mars ambient atmosphere of 514±7 volts at 0.4 torr*cm.
Funding provided by NASA for the Sample Analysis at Mars Project and NASA Astrobiology Institute / Goddard Center for
Astrobiology.

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