In-Situ Electrospray Capture of Organic Bearing Particulates from Comets and Celestial Bodies

NASA has need for technologies that can enable sampling from asteroids and from depth in a comet nucleus, improved in-situ analysis of comets. It has been identified that there is also a requirement for improved dust environment measurements & particle analysis, small body resource identification, and/or quantification of potential small body resources (e.g., oxygen, water and other volatiles, hydrated minerals, carbon compounds, fuels, etc.). We propose to leverage past observations of the ability of electrospray ionization to capture and concentrate polar or polarizable trace species without damage, and combine that knowledge with recent discoveries in developing a hyper velocity ice-gun for NASA studies aimed at ice grain capture simulations. The phase I effort will focus on using the ice gun we created under prior NASA support, and add a novel electrospray cross-current element that creates a soft charging plume across a series of discrete deceleration aerogel plates that we believe will enable in-situ organic analysis capability previously unattainable on board a spacecraft using existing NASA mass spectrometer hardware.