The Shielding Effect of Small Regolith Grains on Photodissociation of Carbon Dioxide

Details The Shielding Effect of Small Regolith Grains on Photodissociation of Carbon Dioxide The Shielding Effect of Small Regolith Grains on Photodissociation of Carbon Dioxide

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.0904p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #9.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.955

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

CO2 has been detected on most of the satellites of Saturn (Buratti et al. 2005; Clark et al. 2005; Brown et al. 2006; Cruikshank et al. 2007). The CO2 absorption feature is strongest on Iapetus indicating an effective thickness of 30 nm (Palmer 2009). However, the photochemical time scale for CO2 on Iapetus is short, 6 months, suggesting that CO2 is actively produced on Iapetus’ surface. Lab experiments have shown that CO2 can be produced from a mixture of water and carbon (Palmer 2009). However, to constrain the production rate of CO2, we evaluated the shielding effect of small grains on the absorption of different wavelengths of light.
Photodissociation of CO2 is dominantly driven by Ly-α UV photons, but the detection of CO2 by Cassini VIMS was done by near-IR photons, 4.2 μm. We evaluated the possibility that a layer of CO2 could exist that was be detected by Cassini VIMS, but was shielded from UV photons by small particles. We report the results of numerical simulations to test this possibility using a randomly generated regolith surface. The surface was created with a log particle size distribution to approximate observed regoliths. The grains were randomly scattered, then allowed to settle down the gravity gradient.

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