??During the last decade, Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) emerged in their role as a repository of primitive planetary material on Earth and are dubbed 'primordial fossils' helping to understand the origin and astrobiological evolution of the Solar System. Using a novel surface scattering machine, we simulate the interaction of ionizing radiation with KBO analog ices and apply these findings to elucidate the formation of key classes of biorelevant molecules (amino acids, dipeptides, sugars, fatty acids, RNA nitrogen-bases). First, we mimic the space environment under clean, contamination-free conditions at ultra-high vacuum (10-11 torr). Second, this setup allows a simulation of the interaction of ionizing radiation with surfaces systematically over a wide range of KBO relevant chemical and physical parameters in the same machine: i) the che-mical composition of the ices [methane (CH4), water (H2O), nitrogen (N2), carbon monoxide (CO), methanol (CH3OH)], ii) ice temperatures 30-50 K, and iii) ionizing radiation in the form of 1 keV protons and 10.2 eV photons (Lyman a) simulating the most significant component of Solar Wind ions and photons interacting with KBO surfaces. Third, we interface four complementary detection schemes to a single machine to probe individual biorelevant molecules on line and in situ. This enables us to identify key functional groups in the ices via infrared (IR), Raman (Ra), and ultraviolet-visual (UV-VIS) spectroscopy. Individual molecules subliming into the gas phase upon warm-up of the samples can be identified via fragment-free reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometry (ReTOF) coupled with vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) soft photo-ionization (ReTOF-PI). This technique has the unique power to identify the molecules based on a cross correlation of their mass-to-charge ratios, their ionization energies (IE), and photoionization efficiency curves (PIE) ultimately unraveling an inventory of individual biorelevant molecules formed upon interaction of ionizing radiation and KBO analog ices.

On the formation of biorelvant molecules in Kuiper Belts: From our solar system to extrasolar Kuiper Belts

248th National Meeting (2014)

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