Sunday, August 2, 2020
By:
I have finally presented my project for the first time in front of a panel of Goddard Space Flight Center personell. I got a chance to get some feedback about what worked and what didn't. They enjoyed the pictures that I included, and said that I should include more explanation about the purpose of the projects. I added more commentary about how LDI mass spectrometry can be applied in NASA programs. I also got a chance to present the slides again on Friday, this time to an astronomy book club.
As for testing, I did some more work with minimizing the coffee stain effect. One of the bits of feedback I got was that for LDI, water is commonly used as a solvent instead of propanol, so I redid some of the experiments. I noticed that the results were not as good as the propanol in terms of homogeneity and spot size, but that airbrushing over a hot plate was still a superior method to using a dropper. I also got some feedback that LDI is used with analytes that have a surface concentration of only 1 picomole per square millimeter, so i did some experiments to replicate those concentrations.
Finally, I got to meet again with my fellow interns on Thursday. We mostly talked about how our summers were going, and a few of them are coming to Colorado, so I might get to meet them!
Alex Mikulich