Summary form only given. One of the critical unsolvedinstrumentation problems in experimental ionospheric physics is themeasurement of the transport properties of the thermal component of lowtemperature (T<1 eV) plasma. Present instruments can only measure thedensity, the temperature and the bulk flow velocity of thermal plasma.There are no in situ instruments that are capable of measuring moredetailed parameters of a low temperature thermal plasma such as pitchangle distribution, electric current density, pressure anisotropy orheat flow. Measurements of these parameters are vitally needed tostimulate further progress in modelling the thermodynamics of theionosphere. We have begun designing an instrument that will be capableof making these measurements. This instrument exploits the uniqueproperties of particle motion in a 2-D or line dipole magnetic field.Particles that enter a region of large 2-D field and applied orthogonalelectric field will retain their initial pitch angles and will arrive atan interior detection surface at a location that is a unique function ofinitial pitch angle, energy, and charge sign. In addition, the particlesgain two orders of magnitude in energy, thus rendering detection easier.This paper describes a plasma analyzer based on this concept
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