Noble Gases in the Terrestrial Planets, with Focus on What the SNC Meteorites Tell Us About Mars

Details Noble Gases in the Terrestrial Planets, with Focus on What the SNC Meteorites Tell Us About Mars Noble Gases in the Terrestrial Planets, with Focus on What the SNC Meteorites Tell Us About Mars

Jan 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002usnc.conf...47p&link_type=abstract

Unmixing the SNCs: Chemical, Isotopic, and Petrologic Components of the Martian Meteorites, p. 47-48

Mathematics

Logic

Protoplanets, Rare Gases, Snc Meteorites, Terrestrial Planets, Mars (Planet), Planetary Atmospheres, Venus (Planet), Solar Wind, Solar Nebula, Argon, Krypton, Isotope Ratios, Xenon, Planetary Nebulae

Scientific paper

Noble gases in the solar wind and giant-planet atmospheres are generally assumed to be the best "perhaps the only" available proxies for isotopic distributions in the early solar nebula. Both, however, may be isotopically fractionated to some degree from their source composition, the wind in processes that transport solar plasma to and release it from the corona, and giant-planet Ar, Kr and Xe by trapping in icy planetesimals if these were indeed the principal suppliers of heavy noble gases to their present atmospheres. Noble gas isotopic ratios in the solar wind are reasonably well established from lunar and asteroidal regolith studies and the Galileo Probe mass spectrometer has given us our first look at compositions in Jupiter's atmosphere. Modern theories of atmospheric evolution on the terrestrial planets are focused on the nebula as the primary supplier of primordial planetary volatiles, either directly -i.e., in ways that do not fractionate isotopes (by adsorption on planetary embryos or "ingassing" from dense, gravitationally condensed atmospheres)- or by accretion of cometary ices carrying noble gases that could have been either isotopically solar or mildly fractionated during trapping from the ambient nebula. The observation that nonradiogenic Ne, Ar, Kr and Xe in Earth's current atmosphere are all isotopically heavier than their solar counterparts is an important clue to the nature of the processes that subsequently acted on these primordial planetary reservoirs. This is also the case on Mars, except for Kr which is isotopically near-solar (and therefore an interesting challenge for evolutionary modeling), and on Venus as well, as far as one can tell from the limited data on hand.

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