Organics Analyzer for Sampling Icy Surfaces: A liquid chromatograph-mass spectrometer for future in situ small body missions

Advances in and prospects of microchip liquid chromatography

“…Exciting progress is also being made on a fully integrated, portable LC-MS device by a group from NASA (and their collaborators) developing an Organics Analyzer for Sampling Icy Surfaces (OASIS) [35,36]. The LC chip is fabricated by bonding silicon and Pyrex wafers together to give a cylindrical channel that maintains flow stability beyond 275 bar.…”

“…The LC chip is fabricated by bonding silicon and Pyrex wafers together to give a cylindrical channel that maintains flow stability beyond 275 bar. With an oval-shaped column shape, they could vary the length from 40-100 mm in a 10 × 5 × 1 mm footprint [35]. The LC column was then integrated with an electrospray tip and electronics that enabled both column temperature control and spray voltage [36] for the eventual coupling to a small (30 × 18 × 13 cm) TOF-MS (time-of-flight MS) analyzer developed separately to create an integrated system that could weigh ~5 kg and only consumes 3 W of power.…”

“…The LC column was then integrated with an electrospray tip and electronics that enabled both column temperature control and spray voltage [36] for the eventual coupling to a small (30 × 18 × 13 cm) TOF-MS (time-of-flight MS) analyzer developed separately to create an integrated system that could weigh ~5 kg and only consumes 3 W of power. The ultimate goal with the OASIS instrument is the extraterrestrial analysis of amino acid enantiomers [35] and other small organic molecules [36]. …”

“…Improvements in both device robustness [24-26] and instrument integration [33-35,39,50] are enabling technology that will be required for high efficiency on-chip chromatographic separations. For low-cost separation techniques, monolithic stationary phases in polymeric chips can be implemented [42-50] and it is possible that further advances in embossing techniques to generate pillar array columns [61] could eventually lead to disposable, one-use chromatography columns.…”

Long‐term thermal stability of fluorescent dye used for chiral amino acid analysis on future spaceflight missions

“…Our lab recently published a chiral CE–LIF method to separate 13 amino acids, including five chiral pairs ( L / D ‐Ala, ‐His, ‐Leu, ‐Ser, and ‐Val), found in high abundance in both abiotic and biotic samples . By increasing the chiral capability, this method is able to achieve science goals that were not met with previously published methods for astrobiology .…”