This week’s Mass Spec News
Meet the mass spec onboard NASA’s Europa Clipper, launched last week – and more MS news
James Strachan | | News
Image credit: Courtesy of SwRI
Essential Reading
NASA's Europa Clipper launched on Monday last week atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Their mission? To explore strange new worlds – or in this case moons, specifically Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa.
There are nine instruments aboard, including the MAss Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration (MASPEX), developed by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), USA.
“MASPEX has a mass resolution 50 times finer than anything that has flown to space before,” said SwRI Senior Vice President Jim Burch, who serves as MASPEX’s principal investigator in a press release. “MASPEX can differentiate between molecules with almost identical masses based on the energy binding the atoms. It also differentiates isotopes — atoms with equal numbers of protons but a different number of neutrons. These capabilities are crucial to revealing the habitability of Europa.”
The ultimate aim is to measure, using MASPEX, the molecular and isotopic composition of the plumes emanating from surface cracks on Europa to assess its potential for supporting life.
Last year, we spoke with several experts about the challenges of detecting life on moons elsewhere in the solar system – including Europa, but also Titan and Enceladus – last year, which you can read here.
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Worth Your Time
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From there I set out to gather as much freelancing experience as I could, spending 2 years developing scientific content for International Innovation, before completing an MSc in Science Communication. After gaining invaluable experience in supporting the communications efforts of CERN and IN-PART, I joined Texere – where I am focused on producing consistently engaging, cutting-edge and innovative content for our specialist audiences around the world.
