The isotopic composition of this gas allows us to determine such things as the age of a meteorite, where it came from and how long it has been in space for. The aims of the project are to establish the host phases of iodine in primitive chondritic metorites in order to gain a better understanding of the iodine-xenon chronometer, and to place constraints on scenarios for the evolution of volatiles on Mars. See below for more information about the use of xenon in geochemistry or meteorites from Mars . For further information contact James Whitby Dept of Earth Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom. 3842 Xenology Xenology is the study of the element xenon, particularly in the context of geochemistry.
Xenon is an odourless, colourless, chemically inert gas with nine stable isotopes.
It is present in the Earth's atmosphere at a concentration of 9ppb, a trace amount. It is, for example, known that xenon from the Earth's atmosphere, Earth's mantle, Mars' atmosphere, meteorites and the sun all have different isotopic compositions. These differences occur because there has not been any opportunity for mixing to occur between these reservoirs for several billion years, and in that time different processes have operated to increase the abundance of some isotopes and to decrease the abundance of others. I trapped within that mineral we can deduce when it formed. In practice this means that we can date iodine containing minerals over a period of about 100Ma from when the solar system formed some 4.6 billion years with a resolution approaching 0.1Ma.