Collection of interstellar gas on the Moon

Abstract

The isotopic composition of He and Ne in the local interstellar medium (LISM) is of great scientific interest, since it will help us to understand the chemical evolution of our galaxy since the formation of the solar system 4.6 × 10 9 years ago. In addition, the He isotope ratio is of cosmological interest as it is linked to primordial (Big Bang) nucleosynthesis and gives us a clue to the baryon density in the universe. To measure the abundance of He and Ne and their isotopes in situ in the interstellar gas is very ambitious due to the low density. Remote sensing, however, gives us only little information on the isotopic composition. Currently, most of the information on He and Ne isotopes comes from the measurement of pick-up ions and of the anomalous component of the cosmic rays, however, the measurement errors are still too high to reach firm conclusions. Recently, a novel measurement method has been proposed, using the foil collection technique and the Moon as a collection platform (Reber et al., 1995). In this notice a detailed description of the experiment is given. The foil collection technique uses thin metallic foils to trap the atoms which impinge on the foil. After retrieval of the foil the trapped particles are extracted by stepwise heating and the released atoms can be analysed using laboratory mass spectrometers. This technique was applied for the first time to successfully measure the noble gas composition of the solar wind (Geiss et al., 1970, 1972). (Interestingly enough, this experiment has been carried out on the Moon as well.) It has been tried before to measure the composition of the interstellar gas applying the foil collection method on an Earth orbiting satellite. However, in this case the measurements might be contaminated by the high fluxes of magnetospheric particles. It is shown that by using the Moon as a platform to collect the interstellar atoms one can overcome these difficulties. The experiment has to be carried out during the lunar night to shield off the solar wind and during times when the Moon is not in the magneto-sheath. An evaluation of the measurement conditions for January 1997, as an example, shows that it is possible to collect the interstellar gas for a consecutive period of about 6 days. Compared to known backgrounds of the mass spectrometric foil analysis a signal-to-background ratio higher than 20 for 3He, 4He, 20Ne, and 22Ne is obtained. A rough estimate shows that neither retrapped lunar ions nor bow-shock ions pose a background problem.