360-DEGREES PANORAMIC VIEW ISOCHRONOUS TIME-OF-FLIGHT MASS-SPECTROMETER

Employing a magnetic field to limit the divergence of ion trajectories in isochronous time-of-flight spectrometers can improve the detection s efficiency and thereby reduce the background if compared to the alre ady realized instrument CYLMAS. The time-of-flight section can be comb ined with a toroidal entrance system and sectorized pixel array detect ors to yield a 360-degrees field-of-view spectrometer. The sectorizati on of such an instrument to be flown on a spinning spacecraft allows a complete mapping of the velocity distribution of the investigated par ticles and it leads to a further reduction of the counting background and a significant improvement of the mass resolution.