Formation of Organic Compounds Through Meteoritic Atmospheric Shock
2024 Research Campaign, Frontier Science
Purpose of Experiment
It is widely accepted that life on Earth started to form during the Archean period of the Earthβs history when the surface was mostly water, and the atmosphere was rich in methane but lacking free oxygen. It is not clear how organic molecules β the building blocks of life β initially formed in this oxygen-poor atmosphere. It is conjectured that the process could have been aided by plasma-meteoroid interaction during atmospheric entries as early as the Late Hadean period, which precedes the Archean. This project aims to investigate the formation of organic and complex inorganic molecules in a laboratory plasma environment by conducting experiments at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility.
The objective of these experiments is to test the hypothesis that organics and/or their complex inorganic precursors could have formed in the plasma tails of meteorites during entries into the Early Earthβs atmosphere. We expect that the interaction of compounds disassociated from the meteorite and compounds already present in the atmosphere will be enabled by the activation energy in the plasma environment. Using principles of physics, chemistry, and geology, our team plans to study the production of the organic compound urea and its inorganic precursor ammonia in controlled laboratory conditions.