Mochii

Mochii is a miniature scanning electron microscope made by Seattle-based startup company Voxa. The Mochii has the same capabilities as a conventional SEM, such as usage in materials science for research purposes, microchip and semiconductor quality control, and medicine.^[2] Mochii users are able to operate the microscope using an IOS app.

Mochii

Developer	Voxa
Type	Scanning electron microscope
Dimensions	210 mm × 210 mm × 265 mm[1]
Website	Official website

History

Development of what ended up being the Mochii began in 2012.^[3] The goal of the Mochii was to take scanning electron microscopes, conventionally large, expensive, and unwieldy tools, and shrink them down in order to decrease cost and increase portability.^[3]

In 2015, Voxa began collaborating with NASA who saw the potential of taking the Mochii to space.^[4] In the last few years, NASA has provided upwards of $450,000^[5] for the development of the Mochii. The Mochii had to confront issues unique to space-based operation such as "errant fluid behavior, residual gravity gradients, cosmic rays, and safety of flight".^[6]

In 2018, the Mochii won the Microscopy Today Innovation Award, an industry award given for inventions that make microscopy more efficient and powerful.^[7]

In June 2019, the Mochii participated in the 23rd NEEMO (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations) mission.^[8]

On February 15, 2020, the Mochii launched on the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, headed to the ISS.^[9][10][11] Voxa's microscope is supposed to help with on-site imaging at the ISS, this eliminates the need for sending the sample back down to Earth which has the issues of cost, time, and potential sample damage.^{[3][12][11][4]}

Specifications

The Mochii measures 21 cm × 21 cm × 26.5 cm ^[13] and weighs around 6 pounds.^[7] The SEM's stage measures 2 cm × 2 cm × 1.5 cm. The Mochii has a swap-able optical cartridge that eliminates the need for in-person servicing. The cartridge has a source potential of 10 kV, a 5000x magnification, a backscatter array detector, and auto-calibration.^[7][13] The microscope is capable of EDS,^[7][13][14] a technique which analyzes the energy spectrum of a sample in order to find out the abundance of certain elements.^[15] The Mochii comes outfitted with an app that runs on Apple devices that run IOS 8 or higher.^[7][13]