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The composition of Io's tenuous atmosphere is poorly constrained. Only themajor species SO2 and a handful of minor species have been positivelyidentified, but a variety of other molecular species should be present, basedon thermochemical equilibrium models of volcanic gas chemistry and thecomposition of Io's environment. This paper focuses on the spectral search forexpected yet undetected molecular species (KCl, SiO, S2O) and isotopes (34SO2).We analyze a disk-averaged spectrum of a potentially line-rich spectral windowaround 345 GHz, obtained in 2010 at the APEX-12m antenna (Atacama PathfinderEXperiment). Using different models assuming either extended atmosphericdistributions or a purely volcanically-sustained atmosphere, we tentativelymeasure the KCl relative abundance with respect to SO2 and derive a range of4x10^{-4}-8x10^{-3}. We do not detect SiO or S2O and present new upper limitson their abundances. We also present the first measurement of the 34S/32Sisotopic ratio in gas phase on Io, which appears to be twice as high as theEarth and ISM reference values. Strong lines of SO2 and SO are also analyzed tocheck for longitudinal variations of column density and relative abundance. Ourmodels show that, based on their predicted relative abundance with respect toSO2 in volcanic plumes, both the tentative KCl detection and SiO upper limitare compatible with a purely volcanic origin for these species.

Exploring Io's atmospheric composition with APEX: first measurement of 34SO2 and tentative detection of KCl