Investigation of Venus Cloud Aerosol and Gas Composition including Potential Biogenic Materials via an Aerosol-Sampling Instrument Package

A lightweight, low-power instrument package to measure, in-situ, both (1) the local gaseous environment and (2) the composition and microphysical properties of attendant Venusian aerosols. This Aerosol-Sampling Instrument Package (ASIP) would be used to explore cloud chemical and possibly biotic processes on future aerial missions such as multi-week balloon missions and on short-duration (<1 hour) probes on Venus and potentially on other cloudy worlds such as Titan, the Ice Giants, and Saturn. A QITMS (Madzunkov and Nikolić, J. Am. Soc. MassSpectr., 25, 1841 - 1852, 2014) fed alternately by (1) anaerosol separator that injects only aerosols into a vaporizer and mass spectrometer, and (2) the pureaerosol-filtered atmosphere, achieves the compositional measurements. Aerosols vaporized < 600 oC are measured over atomic mass ranges from 2 to 300 AMU at <0.02 AMU resolution, sufficient to measure trace materials, their isotopic ratios and potential biogenic materials embedded within H2SO4 aerosols, to better than 20% in < 300 sec for H2SO4 -46 relative abundances of 2 x 10-9. An attached lightweight, compact nephelometer/particle-counter determines the number density and particle sizes of the sampled aerosols.