Appeal No. 1998-0038
Application No. 08/236,780
For the above stated reasons, we will sustain the
examiner's Section 103 rejection based on Champetier of
independent claims 1, 5 and 15 as well as his corresponding
rejection of non-argued, dependent claims 2-4, 6-8, 14 and 18.
However, we cannot sustain the examiner's Section 103
rejection of claims 5, 9, 10, 15 and 16 as being unpatentable
over Barrington in view of Champetier or the corresponding
rejection of claims 11-13 and 17 as being unpatentable over
these references and further in view of Benzing, Cuomo and
Akishin. We agree with the appellants that the applied prior
art contains no teaching or suggestion for combining
Barrington and Champetier in the manner proposed by the
examiner. Specifically, we perceive no reason why an artisan
would have replaced Barrington's heat/volatilization method
for cleaning the electrode of his mass spectrometer with
Champetier's ionic beam method for cleaning contaminants from
spacecraft particularly since Barrington contains no
disclosure that his electrode surface might be subject to
damage of the type which Champetier expressly seeks to avoid
via his low-energy, beam-cleaning method. Indeed, these
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