My second summer at LLNL (2012) also involved working on assembly and debug of the GeMini (described below). I learned about the mechanical and electrical design of the system, and how clever the use of gold-plating is in a detector system originally designed for sattellite use.
The next-generation mechanically-cooled germanium spectrometer has been developed. GeMini (GErmanium MINIature spectrometer) has been designed to bring high- resolution gamma-ray spectroscopy to a range of demanding field environments. Intended applications include short-notice and surprise inspections where positive nuclide identification of radioactive materials is required.