An Ultra-Low Resource Ion Mass Spectrometer for CubeSat Platforms

The Compact Ion Mass Spectrometer (CIMS) is a highly compact ion mass spectrometer capable of mass resolution for low-energy space plasma. CIMS is capable of measuring flux, energy, and mass of ions providing unique measurements of the ionospheric outflow and cold plasma in the magnetosphere. The CIMS utilizes a laminated collimator to define the field-of-view, a laminated electrostatic analyzer to selectively filter ions based on energy-per- charge, a magnetic sector analyzer to separate ions by mass-per-charge, and a microchannel plate with a position sensitive cross-delay anode 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 1000 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 extremely low resource requirements of the CIMS instrument in combination with the relaxed fabrication techniques and ease of assembly allows for rapid and low-cost production