Extraction and analysis of planetary volatiles

Abstract

<p indent="0mm">Planetary volatiles refer to material components that can be separated from a solid sample as a gas phase via physical processes such as impact and heating. On the one hand, these materials are crucial for studying the formation of the solar system and the evolution of planets and their satellites. On the other hand, they provide resources for deep space exploration. Along with the exploration of deep space in recent decades, the detection of volatiles has also advanced our understanding of the cosmos. For example, the discovery of the Moon’s polar ice has changed the impression that the Moon seriously lacks volatiles, the discovery of suspected biogenic methane on Mars has rekindled people’s hope that Mars may once have harbored life, and studies of the hydrogen isotopes in comet 67P have suggested that most of the water on Earth had come from asteroids instead of comets. The combination of pyrolysis in a high-temperature furnace with mass spectrometry is the main method used to extract and analyze volatiles from deep space. This paper summarizes the extraction methods used and the functional parameters of volatile extraction payloads in deep space exploration and compares the performance indexes of the mass spectrometers used for volatile analysis. Furthermore, this paper introduces some volatiles payloads that may be extracted and analyzed in future deep space exploration missions.