When you go through airport security, sometimes they pull you aside and swab your clothes and luggage with a probe which gets put into a machine to see if you’re carrying something you shouldn’t. I don’t know whether the selection for this is random or based on whether you look dodgy, but it’s happened to me a number of times. What does that machine do, and what’s inside it? Being naturally cynical when it comes to airport security theatre, I’ve harboured suspicions it was all for show but, in fact, there’s a lot of stuff inside those machines, some of it radioactive. The technique used is ion mobility spectrometry, which allows very fast detection of specific substances for which the device is calibrated.
The unit disassembled here is a Smiths Detection Ionscan 400B, which is commonly seen in airports in Europe. It claims to detect explosives (PETN, TNT, nitroglycerin, RDX) and “narcotics” (heroin, cocaine, amphetamines) at the parts per billion level.