Electronic Equipment for In-flight Processing of Rocket-borne Mass Spectrometer Data †

Abstract

A data sampling technique is employed in order that the high-frequency signals obtained from a time of flight mass spectrometer may be transmitted over a narrow band telemetry link. By comparing the instantaneous amplitude of two sawtooth waveforms a strobing pulse is obtained which scans the high-frequency signal after amplification. By feeding the output of the strobing circuit to a low-pass filter a slow-speed version of the original signal is formed. A simple transistor pulses to produce fast pulses in a capacitive load is also described.