What are the some of the other challenges of using a mass spectrometer under water?
One challenge is that mass spectrometers require a near-perfect vacuum. Typically, inside the instrument, we have pressures down between a millionth and a billionth of an atmosphere. (One atmosphere is what we experience on Earth’s surface). Also, mass spectrometers typically hate water. They can’t get any water inside of them. So we have to allow compounds to come in, but we cannot let in any water. Basically, we tend to use membranes to do that. It’s not unlike the way a desalinization system works using reverse osmosis. One thing that was kind of a pleasant shock to me was that when we were doing these experiments, we were using enclosures around the sponges, so that they didn’t have access to a continuous supply of ambient seawater. We put them in an enclosure where there was a limited volume of water, and they were re-circulating it through their tissues. Well, one of the things the mass spectrometer picked up was that the enclosure material itself was giving off solvents into the
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- What are the some of the other challenges of using a mass spectrometer under water?
