The Nitrile Deficit: What does Enceladus' lack of significant nitrile chemistry tell us about surface processes and subsurface chemistry?

Details The Nitrile Deficit: What does Enceladus' lack of significant nitrile chemistry tell us about surface processes and subsurface chemistry? The Nitrile Deficit: What does Enceladus' lack of significant nitrile chemistry tell us about surface processes and subsurface chemistry?

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufm.p13f..05h&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #P13F-05

Biology

[5200] Planetary Sciences: Astrobiology, [6060] Planetary Sciences: Comets And Small Bodies / Radiation And Chemistry, [6280] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Saturnian Satellites

Scientific paper

Nitrile species serve as a useful, relatively unambiguous and easily detectable diagnostic species for both aqueous chemistry and surface radiolysis. We have performed electron irradiation experiments of H2O+NH3+hydrocarbon rich ices under conditions comparable to those found on the surface of Enceladus and find that if the reported HCN (Waite et al., 2009) is formed via radiolytic processing or from short-lived eutectic brines derived from surface material, then additional peaks associated with acetonitrile and nitrile-associated polymers should be observed at e.g. m/z = 41, 56, 67, 69, and 84. This is also true for observations of primordial material released from Enceladus' ice. Importantly, many of these peaks were not observed in experiments containing just H2O and hydrocarbons. In the infrared the strong nitrile feature at 4.62 um is predicted by our results but has yet to be reported from VIMS observations. We find it hard to rectify our laboratory results with the nitrogen species reported from INMS data, but our work is consistent with the modeling work of e.g. Zolotov (2007) and Glein et al. (2008). The lack of significant nitrile chemistry on and within Enceladus is potentially an important hallmark of a long-lived alkaline liquid water environment in Enceladus' subsurface. Future observations should target the salt, ammonium formate, which could be derived from HCN hydrolysis.

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