Goals objectives the goal of this work is to support the exploration of the habitability of ICY worlds such as europa by enhancing current understanding of the timescales and mechanisms of organic…

This federal contract award, valued at $651,311.68, was granted by the NASA Shared Services Center to Arizona State University (ASU) to support the exploration of the habitability of icy worlds such as Europa. The research aims to enhance the current understanding of the timescales and mechanisms of organic reactions in hydrothermal systems, which is crucial for interpreting data from analytical instruments like mass spectrometers that will be sent to study icy worlds. The project involves conducting hydrothermal experiments to constrain the reactivity, reaction products, and rates of organic compounds expected to be present on habitable icy worlds. This fundamental research will help to interpret future data and model the interior evolution of icy worlds, including potentially habitable exoplanets and their moons. The award is not associated with a set-aside designation, and no subcontractors were mentioned.

Goals objectives the goal of this work is to support the exploration of the habitability of ICY worlds such as europa by enhancing current understanding of the timescales and mechanisms of organic reactions in hydrothermal systems. Considerable data from experiments already exist for lower temperature conditions that are applicable to the warming and melting of comets, and the low temperature aqueous alteration documented in carbonaceous meteorites. In contrast, experimental constraints on mechanisms and rates of organic reactions at higher temperature hydrothermal conditions are far less abundant. Nevertheless, geophysical models of europa, pluto, ceres, enceladus, and other ICY worlds indicate that long lived hydrothermal conditions prevailed on these bodies, and may continue to the present. Not knowing the consequences of hydrothermal organic transformations hampers scientific understanding of processes that determine the habitability of ICY worlds. Furthermore, as NASA prepares to send mass spectrometers and other analytical equipment to europa, there are pressing needs to be able to interpret planetary processes from data on the relative abundances of organic compounds. Such interpretations will be greatly improved with the results of the proposed experiments. Methodology hydrothermal experiments, using methods we have already developed to study reactions of organic compounds in the earths crust, will constrain the reactivity reaction products and rates of organic compounds expected to be present on habitable ICY worlds. Experiments will reveal mechanisms and rates in hydrothermal water, with and without the presence of minerals, for organic reactions involving carbon carbon and carbon nitrogen bond making and breaking. Experiments will be conducted using a variety of reaction vessels depending on temperature and pressure, and results quantified by various techniques including gas chromatography, ION chromatography, and molecular mass spectrometry. Relevance to the habitable worlds call for proposals the proposed research is directly relevant to the habitable worlds program described in appendix C4 of roses 2015. Specifically, the proposed research relates to the presence of organics and their reactivity. New experimental constraints on reaction mechanisms resulting from this research will enable new interpretations of analytical data from molecular mass spectrometers and other analytical equipment sent to ICY worlds. Data of this type are in hand from enceladus, as well as asteroids and comets. The maspex instrument on nasas mission to europa will also return data of this type. The goal is to provide guidelines for using organic analyses of ICY worlds as the means to probe planetary processes. Armed with data from the proposed experiments, researchers will be able to interpret ratios of various organic compounds to determine whether hydrothermal processes are likely to have occurred on ICY worlds. In the case of europa, much of the current enthusiasm for its habitability stems from the likelihood of hydrothermal processing of ices and organic compounds either in the past or continuing on to the present. In addition, since the proposed experiments will generate fundamental data concerning mechanisms, reaction products, and rates, they will help to constrain new model calculations applied to the interior evolution of ICY worlds. Although not the main targets, the fundamental nature of the proposed research will permit similar models of early mars, and plausible conditions on habitable exoplanets or their moons as observational data improve.