AVS 64th International Symposium & Exhibition
    Vacuum Technology Division Monday Sessions
       Session VT+MN-MoM

Invited Paper VT+MN-MoM8
ROSINA/Rosetta: Exploring the Origin of our Solar System with Mass Spectrometry in Space

Monday, October 30, 2017, 10:40 am, Room 7 & 8

Session: Progress with Measurement in Vacuum
Presenter: Kathrin Altwegg, University of Bern, Switzerland
Correspondent: Click to Email
On 30 September 2016 the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft softly crash-landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and brought an intense period of more than 2 years of continuous investigation to an end. Rosetta data led to many discoveries about the origin of the material and the processing in our early Solar System. Among the payload instruments, ROSINA, the mass spectrometer suite, obtained fundamental properties of the comet by measuring the gases emanating from its nucleus.

Besides detecting many organic molecules never seen in space before, ROSINA was also able to measure precise isotopic abundances for noble gases, sulfur and silicon as well as D/H in water and H2S. By following the comet from 3.8 AU to perihelion and out again to 3.8 AU desorption patterns could be followed for individual species, allowing deeper insights into the nature of cometary ice. Some of the findings clearly point to unprocessed ice from the prestellar stage which allows to study chemistry in the presolar cloud more or less “in situ”.

Some of the most important findings will be discussed in the presentation like the “zoo” of volatile and semi-volatile organics, the isotopic signature of Xenon and its relation with the terrestrial atmosphere.