Micromachined Energy Discriminator

This phase I SBIR project will develop a micromachined charged particle energy discriminator to be used as a principle component in a micromachined plasma spectrometer. The construction of a micromachined device will enable plasma spectrometers to be easily accommodated into NASA?s strategy for using many small spacecraft to perform scientific measurements. A novel high aspect ratio etch process for silicon will be combined with other semiconductor processes to produce a device 1 cm ' 1 cm in area and 500 mm thick capable of selecting charged particles with energies up to 100 keV. The advantages of the silicon approach are that very high aspect ratio channels can be built which will significantly lower the voltage required for energy selection. The use of semiconductor processing techniques also addresses the issues of large volume manufacture, reliability and calibration. The phase I project will demonstrate the basic fabrication process for the device. Phase II will be used to refine the design and mate the energy discriminator with a front end particle collimator and backend microchannel plate stack to build a complete spectrometer unit.