Dr. Daniel E. Austin Featured in C&EN

Dr. Daniel E. Austin is developing a new CDMS detector to characterize the sizes and charges of dust particles in the atmosphere on Mars. 

“Preparing for a human mission to Mars in the next couple decades requires understanding and minimizing the risk of dust-related problems, such as respiratory hazards to astronauts, mechanical effects of dust to pumps or valves that are part of a system to generate oxygen for breathable air or propellant, or buildup of dust on solar panels, radiators, or other systems,” Austin says.

“Every dust grain is going to have a different mass and probably a different electrical charge. And so we have to look at them one at a time and say, ‘Here’s the mass and charge of this one; there’s the mass and charge of that one,’ ” he says. After Austin and his team have measured enough individual particles, they can determine the size distribution of dust particles on Mars.

Austin’s CDMS detector differs from others. The particles that he’s interested in are too massive—bigger even than gigadaltons—to be easily bounced back and forth in a trap. “There’s simply too much momentum for these particles to have their velocity reversed by the electric field without ridiculously high voltages,” Austin says. “We don’t have the option of doing a multipass, multibouncing approach.”

Austin uses electrodes on a printed circuit board and passes the ions over them once. The electrodes detect the charge. To calculate mass, he slows the ions as they go through the system and uses the change in velocity to determine m/z. Measurement precision suffers from not doing a multipass measurement, but Austin is willing to pay that price to be able to detect the particles.

Read the full article by C&EN here