Researchers have reported a new method to detect organic aerosol particles in real-time. The team coupled a home-built Vacuum-assisted Plasma Ionization (VaPI) ion source to an ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) system, resulting in a system for Vacuum-assisted Plasma Ionization-Mass Spectrometry (Aero-VaPI-MS).

The system was successfully tested using organic molecules of interest to prebiotic chemistry, and showed higher performance than traditional aerosol mass spectrometers. As such, the noncommercial Aero-VaPI-MS system could be a low cost alternative to other available platforms.

New and effective technologies for the detection of molecules relevant to astrobiology research could inform the development of future missions beyond Earth. Such instrumentation can also be useful for analyzing samples in the laboratory or field sites on Earth.

The study, “Aerosol Vacuum-Assisted Plasma Ionization (Aero-VaPI) Coupled to Ion Mobility-Mass Spectrometry,” was published in the Journal of The American Society for Mass Spectrometry. The work was performed at the NSF/NASA Center for Chemical Evolution (CCE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. The CCE is a collaborative program supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the NASA Astrobiology Program.