RESUMEN
The Philae lander of the Rosetta space mission made a non-nominal landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, 2014. Shortly after, using the limited power available from Philae's batteries, the COSAC instrument performed a single 18-minutes gas chromatogram, which has remained unpublished until now due to the lack of identifiable elution. This work shows that, despite the unsuccessful drilling of the comet and deposition of surface material in the SD2 ovens, the measurements from the COSAC instrument were executed nominally. We describe an automated search for extremely small deviations from noise and discuss the possibility of a signal from ethylene glycol at m/z 31. Arguments for and against this detection are listed, but the results remain inconclusive. Still, the successful operations of an analytical chemistry laboratory on a cometary nucleus gives great hope for the future of space exploration.
RESUMEN
The most pristine material of the Solar System is assumed to be preserved in comets in the form of dust and ice as refractory matter. ESA's mission Rosetta and its lander Philae had been developed to investigate the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in situ. Twenty-five minutes after the initial touchdown of Philae on the surface of comet 67P in November 2014, a mass spectrum was recorded by the time-of-flight mass spectrometer COSAC onboard Philae. The new characterization of this mass spectrum through non-negative least squares fitting and Monte Carlo simulations reveals the chemical composition of comet 67P. A suite of 12 organic molecules, 9 of which also found in the original analysis of this data, exhibit high statistical probability to be present in the grains sampled from the cometary nucleus. These volatile molecules are among the most abundant in the comet's chemical composition and represent an inventory of the first raw materials present in the early Solar System.
RESUMEN
Comets harbor the most pristine material in our solar system in the form of ice, dust, silicates, and refractory organic material with some interstellar heritage. The evolved gas analyzer Cometary Sampling and Composition (COSAC) experiment aboard Rosetta's Philae lander was designed for in situ analysis of organic molecules on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Twenty-five minutes after Philae's initial comet touchdown, the COSAC mass spectrometer took a spectrum in sniffing mode, which displayed a suite of 16 organic compounds, including many nitrogen-bearing species but no sulfur-bearing species, and four compoundsmethyl isocyanate, acetone, propionaldehyde, and acetamidethat had not previously been reported in comets.
RESUMEN
This paper aims to inspire experimentalists to carry out proposed new chiroptical experiments springing from the theoretical study of the role of parity violation in the origin of biomolecular homochirality and to provide a brief update on the current status of calculations of the electroweak parity-violating energy difference (PVED) between enantiomers. If the PVED did select life's handedness, we would expect to find life on other planets consistently using the same hand as terrestrial biochemistry. Much more importantly, even finding the "wrong" hand (rather than a racemic mixture) on another planet could be the homochiral signature of life, and we discuss our proposal for chiroptical detection of life on extra-solar planets. The PVED may also have an exciting future as a "molecular footprint" of fundamental physics: comparison of calculated PVEDs with measured values could one day allow chemists to do "table-top particle physics" more cheaply with improved chiroptical techniques instead of ever larger particle accelerators. We discuss our proposed chiroptical method to measure the PVED by using molecular beams. To our knowledge, optical rotation has not yet been measured in molecular beams, but the rewards of doing so include a host of other "first ever" results in addition to measurement of the PVED.
