Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Reply to question below.

If they are Si disks like those used in the IC industry...
R.L. — (archived)

Then I dont hold a lot of hope of much surviving... If they were exposed to air then an oxide layer would form and any results retrieved will always be in question- in my last job I worked around fairly large disks of the stuff used for chipmaking, one of the things that we had to do in the process of lithography was to electrically ground the wafer- One side of the wafer is covered in photo resist, under the resist is pure silicon, protected from oxidation by the resist the other side of the wafer was SiO2 - oxidized by the atmosphere. I am unsure how thick this layer of oxide was, but the grounding pins had to scratch through this oxide layer before grounding could take place. If the oxide layer that forms is comparable to the depth of ion implantation the all is lost.

There is hydrogen in our atmosphere and it diffuses fairly easily in many materials...
so hydrogen abundances would be quickly ruined...

Sadly the best we can hope for is that the samples are heavily fragmented, and if exposed to atmosphere they may be fatally compromised...

Anyone know what analysis methods were going to be used on the samples? Auger analysis?

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