Experimental Design for the Measurement and Analysis of Vibration-Rotation Spectra of Molecules Relevant to Extra-Terrestrial Bodies
AIChE Annual Meeting
2021
2021 Annual Meeting
Annual Student Conference
Undergraduate Student Poster Session: Education & General Papers
Monday, November 8, 2021 - 10:00am to 12:30pm
High-precision spectroscopy in the near-infrared (NIR) will be central to improving future measurements in many fields, including meteorology and
astronomy. For the accurate spectroscopic analysis of planetary atmospheres, including Earth’s, high-precision NIR spectra for simple molecules such as acetylene, methane, water, and carbon dioxide are needed, but current data still contains myriad ambiguous and unassigned features at lower than ideal precision. Consequently, there still exists data from NASA missions such as the Cassini probe that have been unable to be analyzed due to poor laboratory references. As more space missions are initiated, notably NASA’s “New Frontiers†program
and the Titan Saturn System Mission, new planetary atmospheric data will be collected, and such data will require adequate high-precision laboratory data
in order to make confident conclusions about those atmospheres. Recording all this data is a massive undertaking, and it will require many spectroscopists to
accomplish, so cultivating interest in the field is a crucial step towards accelerating progress. Therefore, we present an experimental design that records NIR
absorption spectra of simple molecules using relatively cheap materials as compared to the highest precision experiments but achieves a much higher precision
than traditional off-the-shelf spectrometers traditionally used in teaching laboratories. We record several lines of acetylene as a proof of concept,
and we measure Boltzmann’s constant as an example for a teaching laboratory and as a benchmark for the quality of the spectrometer.
astronomy. For the accurate spectroscopic analysis of planetary atmospheres, including Earth’s, high-precision NIR spectra for simple molecules such as acetylene, methane, water, and carbon dioxide are needed, but current data still contains myriad ambiguous and unassigned features at lower than ideal precision. Consequently, there still exists data from NASA missions such as the Cassini probe that have been unable to be analyzed due to poor laboratory references. As more space missions are initiated, notably NASA’s “New Frontiers†program
and the Titan Saturn System Mission, new planetary atmospheric data will be collected, and such data will require adequate high-precision laboratory data
in order to make confident conclusions about those atmospheres. Recording all this data is a massive undertaking, and it will require many spectroscopists to
accomplish, so cultivating interest in the field is a crucial step towards accelerating progress. Therefore, we present an experimental design that records NIR
absorption spectra of simple molecules using relatively cheap materials as compared to the highest precision experiments but achieves a much higher precision
than traditional off-the-shelf spectrometers traditionally used in teaching laboratories. We record several lines of acetylene as a proof of concept,
and we measure Boltzmann’s constant as an example for a teaching laboratory and as a benchmark for the quality of the spectrometer.