Computer Science – Performance
Scientific paper
Apr 2003
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003eaeja.....1056s&link_type=abstract
EGS - AGU - EUG Joint Assembly, Abstracts from the meeting held in Nice, France, 6 - 11 April 2003, abstract #1056
Computer Science
Performance
Scientific paper
Gas chromatography (GC) is a powerful analytical technique which has been widely used in the exploration of other planetary atmospheres and surfaces. It was part of the scientific payloads devoted to in situ chemical analysis of the soil of Mars, the atmosphere of Venus, and it is currently present in the Huygens probe en route to explore Titan’s atmosphere as well as in the Rosetta lander probe to investigate a cometary nucleus. Obviously, since it was first used in a Viking probe (1976), space GC was improved to fulfil the more and more constraining scientific and space instrumental requirements. More particularly, the separation part, composed of chromatographic columns, was the subject of transformations which contributed to significantly improve the efficiency and the sensitivity of the technique. But on the other hand, space GC detectors remained relatively rudimentary systems, if one except the introduction of mass spectrometry coupled to GC, and they became the limiting factor to a better sensitivity of the whole instrument. In other words, much more sensitive space GC is now required to investigate the composition in organics of hostile environments, as can be the soil of Mars where concentration in organics could be limited to trace levels. That is the reason why, in order to overcome this limitation, we are currently leading a research and development program funded by the space French agency to develop a new type of space chromatographic detector which could meet the objectives of the future space GC : the pulsed discharge helium ionisation detector (PDHID). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the compatibility of the analytical performances of PDHID with space exploration requirements, by presenting the results of a series of experiments led with a commercial version of PDHID. These results made us starting a program of miniaturisation of this type of detector to build a version compatible with space instrumentation requirements in terms of mass and clearance. We thus intend to demonstrate that PDHIDs could become the new generation of gas chromatographic detector for trace analysis in space exploration, first application of which could be the detection of organics in the soil of Mars with the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) experiment on Mars Smart Lander 2009.
Brun Jean-Francis
Cabane Michel
Coll Patrice
Coscia David
Eugenie J.
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