[meow_cat]

Yay, my research field on Hackernews!

Great achievement. The title is of course misleading: The Orbitrap itself (the part that "fits in your hand") was hardly miniaturized, it's about the same size as a regular one [0]. The achievement is to miniaturize "mass, volume and" (IMO especially!) "power requirements" of the box around it (which, even miniaturized, does not fit in your hand). This runs at 41W and weighs 8kg. A commercial instrument runs at a total of ~2kW and weighs >100kg.

(Though in space they have the convenient advantage that no extra vacuum system is needed, which makes up a lot of space and energy consumption of these instruments here on Earth. The atmosphere on Europa is conveniently just about the "natural" operating conditions of an Orbitrap, which is required for its high accuracy.)

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbitrap_Mass_Analyz...