Laser desorption mass spectrometry – Alien detector that fits in your hand
nature.com
nature.com
Great achievement. The title is of course misleading: The Orbitrap itself (the part that "fits in your hand") was hardly miniaturized, it's about the same size as a regular one [0]. The achievement is to miniaturize "mass, volume and" (IMO especially!) "power requirements" of the box around it (which, even miniaturized, does not fit in your hand). This runs at 41W and weighs 8kg. A commercial instrument runs at a total of ~2kW and weighs >100kg.
(Though in space they have the convenient advantage that no extra vacuum system is needed, which makes up a lot of space and energy consumption of these instruments here on Earth. The atmosphere on Europa is conveniently just about the "natural" operating conditions of an Orbitrap, which is required for its high accuracy.)
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbitrap_Mass_Analyz...
https://astrobiology.com/2023/01/tricorder-tech-new-small-la...
An "Orbitrap" seems to be a particular form of mass spectrometer. The Wikipedia article also contains a cut-away image of an Orbitrap cell, showing the shape of the inner electrode and the chamber:
At burning man I started talking to this guy who claimed to be an undercover FBI agent. He told me they used mass spec to look for big time meth dealers. They would scrape up some dirt around suspected camps and run it through a mass spec to check for higher than average levels of the drug. Maybe he was just screwing with me, but he seemed sincere.
I'd believe that some law enforcement wants to have tests that almost always test positive, just like drug dog checking just does what the handler wants, because it is convenient to get people arrested when they want to.
I know some geochemists who would love a portable mass spec...
They sell those already. They cost around $30,000 per unit.
There are two main varieties typically used by geologists (and also in many other fields):
One is based on X-rays, which is the older, slower and more limited detection-range technology, that have the positive of being non-destructive (well, other than perhaps to the user depending on how they wield it...).
The other, typically referred to as "LIBS", are based on high-intensity laser bursts that destroy a tiny portion of the material being analysed and then run some kind of analysis on the gases produced in the ignition.
There are even particular models available of the latter [0] that have small replaceable argon gas canisters included which then enable the detection of every known element up to Uranium, though I don't know how accurate they are. They're also typically much faster at analysis than the X-Ray models.
[0] https://sciaps.com/libs-handheld-laser-analyzers/z-903-libs/
Even a modern phone is already simply incidentally a sensing platform that 50 years ago would certainly have been very expensive, and probably not fit into the phone form factor even if everything else was evicted. Just a full 3D accelerator, temperature sensor, pressure sensor, compass/magnetism sensor, and general EMF detector is an impressive lineup.
However the tiny Argon bottle does not give me much confidence.
Maybe it's better than expected in typical use cases.
Sure, there are portable mass spectrometers, in the sense of something you can put a sample in and also carry around. But they still require getting a sample, preparing it, and putting it in the machine.
They're not something you can scan with.
Especially in geochemistry, "scannability" / ability to process large sections of a core without manual sample prep is a big deal.
You usually have hundreds of meters to kilometers of core (thin cylinder of rock) or a deep borehole that you're trying to extract information out of alongside other measurements + manual logging.
Lots of things need destructive sampling, so you will do more things that actually take samples and process them, but non-destructive "scanning-style" methods are a huge help.