Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.3018c&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #30.18; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1031
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The announcement of recent detections of Martian methane [1,2,3,4] resulted in many questions, including "how is it being destroyed so quickly?" The expected destruction mechanism, photochemistry, has a lifetime of 350 Earth years in the Martian atmosphere [3,5] which is about 600 times longer than the 0.6 Earth year lifetime estimated from the observations [1]. No mechanism has yet been identified to answer this question, but a few possibilities have been proposed including surface reactions with peroxide or perchlorate [1].
The sparse number of methane detections provide little constraint on the destruction mechanism. NASA Ames GCM [6] simulations provide a tool to investigate the gas abundance as well as the destruction lifetime needed to produce the observations. Previous work simulating the gas abundance has shown that the source magnitude required to produce the observed abundance is at least an order of magnitude larger than estimated by [1],[5,7].
Destruction lifetime will be investigated considering the availability of the gas within the boundary layer for an interaction with a chemical on the surface. As the destruction mechanism may be dependent on the temperature or dust column abundance, sensitivity to these quantities will be investigated.
This work is funded by New Mexico Space Grant.
[1] Mumma, et al., Science, 2009
[2] Krasnopolsky, et al., Icarus, 2004
[3] Formisano, et al., Science, 2004
[4] Fonti and Marzo, A&A, 2010
[5] Lefevre and Forget, Nature, 2009
[6] Kahre et al., JGR, 2006
[7] Chizek et al., DPS, 2009
Chizek Malynda
Haberle Robert M.
Kahre Melinda A.
Murphy Ronald J.
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