Investigation of Venus cloud aerosol and gas composition including potential biogenic materials via an aerosol-sampling instrument package

A lightweight, low-power instrument package to measure,&nbsp;in situ,&nbsp;both (1) the local gaseous environment and (2) the composition and microphysical properties of attendant venusian aerosols is presented. This Aerosol-Sampling Instrument Package (ASIP) would be used to explore cloud chemical and possibly biotic processes on future aerial missions such as multiweek balloon missions and on short-duration (&lt;1&thinsp;h) probes on Venus and potentially on other cloudy worlds such as Titan, the Ice Giants, and Saturn. A quadrupole ion-trap mass spectrometer (QITMS; Madzunkov and Nikolić,&nbsp;J Am Soc Mass Spectrom&nbsp;25:1841&ndash;1852, 2014) fed alternately by (1) an aerosol separator that injects only aerosols into a vaporizer and mass spectrometer and (2) the pure aerosol-filtered atmosphere, achieves the compositional measurements. Aerosols vaporized &lt;600&deg;C are measured over atomic mass ranges from 2 to 300 AMU at &lt;0.02 AMU resolution, sufficient to measure trace materials, their isotopic ratios, and potential biogenic materials embedded within H2SO4&nbsp;aerosols, to better than 20% in &lt;300&thinsp;s for H2SO4&nbsp;-relative abundances of 2&thinsp;&times;&thinsp;10&minus;9. An integrated lightweight, compact nephelometer/particle-counter determines the number density and particle sizes of the sampled aerosols.</p