Io Blog |
Io Blog |
Feb 26 2008, 08:50 AM
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Senior Member Group: Moderator Posts: 3242 Joined: 11-February 04 From: Tucson, AZ Member No.: 23 |
Just let you all know about a new blog I've started called The Gish Bar Times located at http://gishbar.blogspot.com/ . I intend to use the blog to cover Io-related news like new papers or abstracts, developments with the flagship mission selection process, newly processed images, volcano news, or pretty photos taken of Io and Jupiter. I hope you all enjoy!
-------------------- &@^^!% Jim! I'm a geologist, not a physicist!
The Gish Bar Times - A Blog all about Jupiter's Moon Io |
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Aug 4 2010, 02:08 AM
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Senior Member Group: Moderator Posts: 2785 Joined: 10-November 06 From: Pasadena, CA Member No.: 1345 |
Here is a handy reference regarding elemental sulfur and planetary geology:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntr..._1982025583.pdf And of course, to keep the pure sulfur allotropes apart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_sulfur (I've used S8 before, and it was stinky, but this may have been due to trace impurities generated during the reaction.) In general, sulfur and thiol compounds do stink. Each has there own, uhhhh, particular characteristic aroma. The really high molecular weight ones don't volatilize. Naphthyl-thiol is stink free, but benzene thiol will stink quite nicely - enough to clear a lab. Amines can also stink (fishy odor) Pyridines also stink (dead seaweed odor, you get used to it, but it will cause impotence). Acrylonitrile (a significant component on Titan) will bring tears to your eyes. It is a lachrymator. (Yours truly evacuated a lab accidentally with the similar compound acrolein. It took me 3 hours to quit crying.) Your best bang for your buck for smell factor comes with isocyanides and phosphines. Those are just plain vile. They have a unique smell all to their own. It is hard to describe, but once you've smelled it, you'll respect it. Spills of those materials are enough to evacuate a building (they are also pretty toxic.) But in general, smell is difficult to talk about on Io. Your nasal receptors detect things that have diffused to it, and absorbed onto the receptor itself (a pseudoaqueous environment). If you ever smelled Io directly, you'd be dead (no pressure). If you brought Io stuff back to Earth and put it in a lab, it would be able to react with ambient oxygen and water to generate trace compounds (such as volatile sulfides) that your nose would likely find offensive. The critical thing is that you would be need to expose Io stuff to a new aqueous and oxygen-rich environment in order to smell it. -------------------- Some higher resolution images available at my photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678681@N07/
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Aug 4 2010, 02:26 AM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Moderator Posts: 3242 Joined: 11-February 04 From: Tucson, AZ Member No.: 23 |
The first link is a great little publication. Actually have an original hard copy of it
Certainly my article pertaining particularly to the compounds that were found by Moullet et al., SO2, SO, and NaCl (and we can add S2/S8 to this discussion as well, though it wasn't part of their study). And of those molecules, none smell like rotten eggs, but at worst smell like burnt matches (not the best smell, but not horrendous either). But you have a good point, in order to smell anything on Io (or Titan or Mars), you would have to bring it into an alien environment, which could produce compounds like hydrogen sulfide, which does smell quite bad. Anyways, the main point I wanted to get across with my article was the terrible re-reporting of the space.com article, focusing more on the line about how bad Io might smell, and less about the results of the paper the space.com article was reporting on. I can understand trying to connect these findings with a broad audience, but the approach taken by space.com and others was poor. For example, why not emphasize the discovery of sodium chloride in Io's atmosphere? "Gaseous table salt found in the atmosphere of Jupiter's Moon Io"? "Jupiter's moon sulfurous with a dash of salt"? -------------------- &@^^!% Jim! I'm a geologist, not a physicist!
The Gish Bar Times - A Blog all about Jupiter's Moon Io |
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