| Summary: | International audience The chemical analysis of lunar samples collected in the regolith or rocks is of primary importance to assess their content in volatile species. These volatiles could reveal, for instance, part of the nature of : materials delivered to Earth from exogenous sources, minerals present in the Lunar regolith and surface rocks, and Lunar indigenous organic material. These are key information to improve our knowledge on the origin and evolution of the Moon, but also on important processes for the prebiotic chemistry that took place on Earth. Even if the accuracy and sensitivity of the analytical instrumentation used in the laboratory are very high to characterise the chemical content of samples brought from the Moon, the journey of these samples in space, as well as their transportation to the Earth environment, could change the nature in the volatile content of the samples (e.g. loss of chemical species, possible chemical reactions or contaminations). For these reasons, in situ chemical analysis, in addition to provide direct information on the chemical composition of the Lunar regolith, could be of precious help for the interpreting the results obtained in the laboratory, and their transposition to the Moon surface environment.This is the reason why our team proposes an instrumentation to characterize in situ the content of volatiles in the lunar soil and rocks. This instrumentation is part of the Luna Resurs payload. This space probe should land near the lunar South pole, thus giving for the first time the opportunity to characterise this region which is thought to be rich in volatiles from remote sensing, whereas the previous lunar missions were all constrained to land near the equator. Our instrumentation is based on pyrolysis coupled with gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. It has the capability to: extract volatile materials (either condensed or present in the minerals) from the solid samples; separate the volatile and analyze their structure for identification and quantification; ...
|
|---|