This pathway describes the development of soft gamma-ray/hard x-ray detector arrays at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC, or Goddard), through a collaboration between the gamma-ray spectroscopy group and the detector branch. The Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CdZnTe, or CZT) detectors which resulted from this decade-long development were first flown on the wildly successful SWIFT mission in 200...

Up until about a year ago, gamma-ray spectroscopy has always been done using the analog amplifier, which processes the pulses from the preamplifier to remove the noise, reject the pile-up signals, and shape the signals into some desirable form before sending them to the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to be digitized. In late 1996, EG&G Ortec introduced a digital gamma-ray spectrometer (DSPec...

We present the design and analysis of a new gamma ray spectrometer for planetary science that uses an array of CdZnTe detectors to achieve the detection efficiency needed for orbital measurements. The use of CdZnTe will provide significantly improved pulse height resolution relative to scintillation-based detectors, with commensurate improvement in the accuracy of elemental abundances determine...

2.1. X-ray Based Detection Systems: 11 2.2. Elements of Neutron Physics and Properties: 13 2.3. Gamma Spectroscopy Neutron Based Techniques: 14 2.3.1. Thermal Neutron Analysis (TNA): 17 2.3.2. Fast Neutron Analysis (FNA): 19 2.3.3. Pulsed Fast Neutron Analysis (PFNA): 19 2.3.4. Pulsed Fast-Thermal Neutron Analysis (PFTNA): 20 2.3.5. Associated (Alpha) Particle – Time-of-Flight Neutron Analysis ...

A previous experimental evaluation’ of nine commercial gamma-ray spectroscopy systems demonstrated significant benefits of digital signal processing for improvements in the performance of high-resolution gamma-ray spectroscopy systems. Spectacular improvements in the energy resolution and throughput of germanium detectors were demonstrated for the DSPEC. Recently, a new, improved version of DSP...