Suppose you are faced with the need to quickly detect or identify a vanishingly small quantity of a chemical compound. If your business is environmental monitoring, chemical arms control, forensic analysis, chemical processing, or drug interdiction, and time and place are often of the essence, then you'll almost certainly want to add the Viking SpectraTrak 620 to your tool kit. For a mere US$147,000, this portable gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer can do everything that bulky room-filling laboratory units can do, plus more, and it can do it in real time, right on your real site.
The SpectraTrak, which currently has a library of 74,000 compounds, can detect and identify substances down below the picogram (trillionth of a gram) level. It can handle water, air, and soil samples, and it also includes such goodies as automated atmospheric sampling with a built-in sampling pump and flow meter, a built-in concentrator/desorber, and internal cryofocusing for analyzing volatile organic compounds at very low temperatures (down to -190 degrees Celsius).
The SpectraTrak is based on technology developed for the Viking Mars Mission, combined with miniaturization advances in mass spectrometry, gas chromatography, ion optics technology, temperature control, vacuum technology, and, of course, computer technology.
The 125-pound, ruggedly built unit (it comes in a shock-mounted weatherproof transport case with individual protection of key components) can be easily transported and then moved on a hand truck or operated out of the back of a station wagon. Such portability – which saves time, improves accuracy, and enables real-time, on-site analysis – marks the SpectraTrak 620 as a truly outstanding and unique technological achievement. The SpectraTrak may be bigger than a 23rd-century TriCorder, but it's far more compact and functional than once would have been thought possible.
SpectraTrak 620: US$147,000. Viking Instruments Corporation: +1 (703) 758 9339, fax +1 (703) 391 2910.
STREET CRED
Online User's EncyclopediaTwo Tot-Enthralling Titles
The Personal Information Industry and You
Proto TriCorder
