An Assessment of Organics Detection and Characterization on the Surface of Europa with Infrared Spectroscopy

Abstract Organics, if they do exist on Europa, may only be present in trace amounts on the surface. NASA’s upcoming mission Europa Clipper is going to provide global, high-quality data of the surface of Europa in the near-infrared (NIR), specifically the 3–5 μ m region, where organics are rich in spectroscopic features. In this work we investigate Europa Clipper’s ability to constrain the abundance of selected trace species of interest that span different chemical bonds found in organics, such as C–H, C=C, C≡C, C=O, and C≡N, via NIR spectroscopy in the 3–5 μ m wavelength region. We simulate reflectance spectra of these trace species mixed with water ice, at varying signal-to-noise ratio and abundance fractions. The evidence for the trace species in a mixture is evaluated using two approaches: (1) calculating average strength of absorption feature(s), and (2) Bayesian model comparison (BMC) analysis. Our simulations show that sharp and strong spectroscopic features of trace (∼5% abundance by number) organic species should be detectable at >3 σ significance in Europa Clipper–quality data. A BMC analysis pushes the 3 σ detection threshold of trace species even lower to <1% abundance. We also consider an example with all trace species mixed together, with overlapping features, and BMC is able to retrieve strong evidence for all of them and also provide constraints on their abundance. These results are promising for Europa Clipper’s capability to detect trace organic species, which would allow correlations to be drawn between the composition and geological regions with possibly endogenic material.