Investigating the contribution of methane produced by ablating micrometeorites to the atmosphere of Mars
Section snippets
The methane of Mars
Methane has been detected in the atmosphere of Mars, at an average concentration of 10 ± 3 ppbv as observed by an Earth-based telescope (Krasnopolsky et al., 2004), at 10 ± 5 ppbv (Formisano et al., 2004) and 14 ± 5 ppbv (Geminale et al., 2008) by the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer on the orbiting Mars Express spacecraft. The lifetime of this methane has been estimated to be around 300–600 yr (Wong et al., 2003, Formisano et al., 2004, Krasnopolsky et al., 2004, Krasnopolsky, 2006, Atreya et al., 2007).
Production of methane upon pyrolysis of organic matter in micrometeorites
However, estimates of the contribution of micrometeoritic organic matter to the martian methane budget based on the free methane content of 0.14 ppm do not consider the possibility of the production of methane upon atmospheric entry, and indeed assume that organic matter subjected to intense heating upon atmospheric entry is oxidized and destroyed (Formisano et al., 2004, Krasnopolsky et al., 2004, Atreya et al., 2007). Infalling meteoritic material can be split into two groups, depending on
Determining the methane yield from carbonaceous meteorites using pyrolysis-FTIR
We have investigated the potential of micrometeorites to generate methane during ablation upon atmospheric entry using analytical flash pyrolysis to simulate the heat of atmospheric entry and ablation, with the products of pyrolysis being characterised by Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR). This approach has been used to quantify the gas yields from organic-rich materials, where this technique is described in full (Court and Sephton, 2009a, Court and Sephton, 2009b). Briefly,
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by STFC. We are grateful for the constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers.
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