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A Finely Tuned Instrument

The Fast-Imaging Plasma Spectrometer

The FIPS energy analyzer

Getting a spacecraft into orbit around Mercury has created some astronomical problems for designers. Expense, for one. Complexity, for another. And finally, risk -- the region around the Sun is so hostile that it threatens the craft, its instrumentation and, consequently, the entire exploratory mission. So the challenge for scientists has been, among other things, to develop new designs and relatively new technologies to create instruments that are extremely lightweight yet powerful enough to extract vast amounts of information and can withstand the harshest of environments.

The College of Engineering's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences department (AOSS) solved an important part of that problem when it developed the Fast-Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS) -- an easier, less expensive and less risky way to collect data in the extremely hostile neighborhood close to the sun.

3-D Position-Sensitive Gamma-Ray Spectrometers

The HgI2 semiconductor gamma-ray detector

Gamma-ray spectroscopy -- the measurement of the wavelengths and energies of gamma rays -- has come a long way. Whereas it was once a mere curiosity, it has become a science with several practical and important applications in medical imaging and in matters of security.

Throughout most of the time that researchers did their work, the bulk of the work revolved around two types of instruments: scintillation and semiconductor gamma-ray spectrometers that require cooling in liquid nitrogen. However, in recent years the focus of this research shifted to the development of position-sensitive high-purity semiconductor detectors that can be operated at room temperature. The results have been encouraging, and the potential applications have stimulated additional research and attracted interest because of their relevance to issues such as security and medical imaging.