This past summer has been quite exciting in terms of the early earth atmosphere project! In the summer of 2016 the aerosol chambers were updated to allow for some fun new cryo abilities! During this past summer we have been using those new capabilities to get a better look at how the temperature affects the production of the aerosols that we have been forming!
Another cool addition to our lab is that we added a UV/Vis spectrometer to our early Earth chamber. This will allow us to do long term kinetic studies on room temperature gas mixtures. The Titan chamber and the early earth chamber use different combinations of gases to being able to do spectroscopy on the contents of the early Earth chamber will allow us to capture some new data!
We are currently working on analyzing the data looking at the effect of temperature on the rate of the reaction. We are also looking at expanding other parameters. Currently we are doing cryogenic kinetic studies on gases at different concentrations and trying each of these different concentrations at different temperatures.
--Nicole Bishop, Future Webmaster (starting January 2018)