The heart of a lunar sensor

Image: The heart of the Exospheric Mass Spectrometer (EMS) is visible in this image of the key sensor that will study the abundance of lunar water and water ice for upcoming missions to the Moon. This spectrometer is being delivered to NASA today as part of the PITMS instrument for its launch to the Moon later this year. EMS is based on an 'ion trap', an ingenious detector device that allows researchers to identify and quantify sample atoms and molecules in a gas and allows to establish a corres...