Journal
ANALYTICAL AND BIOANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY
Volume 407, Issue 23, Pages 6939-6963Publisher
SPRINGER HEIDELBERG
DOI: 10.1007/s00216-015-8903-z
Keywords
Capillary electrophoresis/electrophoresis; Microfluidics/microfabrication; Organic compounds/trace organic compounds; Separations/instrumentation; Technology readiness level; Systems engineering
Funding
- Planetary Instrument Concepts for the Advancement of Solar System Observations (PICASSO) program
- NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We present a comprehensive discussion of the role that microchip electrophoresis (ME) instrumentation could play in future NASA missions of exploration, as well as the current barriers that must be overcome to make this type of chemical investigation possible. We describe how ME would be able to fill fundamental gaps in our knowledge of the potential for past, present, or future life beyond Earth. Despite the great promise of ME for ultrasensitive portable chemical analysis, to date, it has never been used on a robotic mission of exploration to another world. We provide a current snapshot of the technology readiness level (TRL) of ME instrumentation, where the TRL is the NASA systems engineering metric used to evaluate the maturity of technology, and its fitness for implementation on missions. We explain how the NASA flight implementation process would apply specifically to ME instrumentation, and outline the scientific and technology development issues that must be addressed for ME analyses to be performed successfully on another world. We also outline research demonstrations that could be accomplished by independent researchers to help advance the TRL of ME instrumentation for future exploration missions. The overall approach described here for system development could be readily applied to a wide range of other instrumentation development efforts having broad societal and commercial impact.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available