Highly sensitive organic analysis is key to understanding the processes that shape an extraterrestrial location, its potential habitability, and whether it could host life presently or in the past. However, some extraterrestrial locations, like those of the surface of icy moons, are challenging to access with a soft lander, making high-impact (50,000 g) kinetic penetrators an attractive mission platform. Laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detection systems provide highly sensitive (sub parts-per-trillion) organic analysis, and programmable microfluidic architectures can enable complex fluidic mixing in a monolithic microfabricated device. In this work, we have developed an impact-robust optical stack for laser-induced fluorescence detection. A breadboard system was built, and demonstrated to have sub-parts-per-trillion detection limits for amino acids. Hydraulic valves use an incompressible ionic liquid for actuation rather than a compressible fluid with pneumatic actuation, which may improve impact resilience, and are actuated with linear actuators. A majority of components have been tested and demonstrated to survive impacts at 12,000 g, 25,000 g, and 50,000 g. This work proves that optical detection systems including those for highly sensitive laser-induced fluorescence detection can be made robust to the high accelerations of a kinetic penetrator platform, enabling “smart” impactor mission formats and access to significantly more challenging, and interesting, terrains on icy moons.

High impact chemistry: Design and testing an icy moon penetrator organic analyzer

2019 Spring National Meeting

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