A Compact Ion Mass Spectrometer (CIMS) for Ionospheric Outflow and Cold Magnetospheric Plasma Measurements (CIMS)

We will design, fabricate, and test a highly compact low-resource ion mass spectrometer capable of high-mass resolution (M/dM=15) for low-energy ionospheric and magnetospheric ions. The Compact Ion Mass Spectrometer (CIMS) utilizes a laminated collimator to define the field-of-view (FOV), a laminated electrostatic analyzer (ESA) to selectively filter ions based on energy-per-charge (E/q), a magnetic sector analyzer to separate ions by mass-per-charge (M/q), and a microchannel plate (MCP) with a position sensitive cross-delay anode (XDL) assembly to detect the location of the ions on the detector plane. This ion mass spectrometer is a simple, compact, and robust instrument ideal for obtaining low-energy (0.1 eV to 100 eV) ion composition measurements of ionospheric and cold magnetospheric space plasma. The instrument design has significant mass and volume savings when compared to current state-of-the-art ion mass spectrometers and has the additional advantage of being able to simultaneously measure multiple ion species signals of a given energy at 100% duty cycle, thus providing a true mass spectrum. The concept and operation are intrinsically simple, and enable ultrafast (<0.1 s) measurement of plasma ion composition to provide new understanding of the physical processes that drive the complex plasma dynamics in space.

Support NASA's Heliophysics strategic science objectives to understand the Sun and its interactions with Earth and the solar system, including space weather. This will be achieved by developing/demonstrating instrumentation technology necessary to address the following science goals: Explore the physical processes in the space environment from the Sun to the Earth and throughout the solar system; Advance our understanding of the connections that link the Sun, the Earth, planetary space environments, and the outer reaches of our solar system; Develop the knowledge and capability to detect and predict extreme conditions in space to protect life and society and to safeguard human and robotic explorers beyond Earth.

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