| Crynodeb: | <p>A lightweight, low-power instrument package to measure, <em>in situ,</em> 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 (<1 h) probes on Venus and potentially on other cloudy worlds such as Titan, the Ice Giants, and Saturn.</p>
<p>A quadrupole ion-trap mass spectrometer (QITMS; Madzunkov and Nikolić, <em>J Am Soc Mass Spectrom</em> 25:1841–1852, 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 <600°C are measured over atomic mass ranges from 2 to 300 AMU at <0.02 AMU resolution, sufficient to measure trace materials, their isotopic ratios, and potential biogenic materials embedded within H<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub> aerosols, to better than 20% in <300 s for H<sub>2</sub>SO<sub>4</sub> -relative abundances of 2 × 10<sup>−9</sup>. An integrated lightweight, compact nephelometer/particle-counter determines the number density and particle sizes of the sampled aerosols.</p>
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