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Spinoff story
IonCCD Enables Fast, Reliable, Inexpensive Mass Spectrometry
A real-world story of NASA technology finding a life beyond the mission.
About this technology
Overview
Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers and a start-up company worked together to create a small, low-voltage mass spectrometer, which identifies isotopes in a material. A key innovation was replacing traditional camera film in the focal plane detector with a charge-coupled device array, a kind of digital imager. Today, College Station, Texas-based OI Analytical, a subsidiary of Xylem, incorporates that digital detector array into its IDS 2030 Charged Particle Detector, which analytical chemists, the pharmaceutical industry, the military, and others use for various mass spectrometry applications.