TOF-Bρ mass measurements of very exotic nuclides for astrophysical calculations at the NSCL

Atomic masses play a crucial role in many nuclear astrophysics calculations. The lack of experimental values for relevant exotic nuclides triggered a rapid development of new mass measurement devices around the world. The time-of-flight (TOF) mass measurements offer a complementary technique to the most precise one, Penning trap measurements (Blaum 2006 Phys. Rep. 425 1), the latter being limited by the rate and half-lives of the ions of interest. The NSCL facility provides a well-suited infrastructure for the TOF mass measurements of very exotic nuclei. At this facility, we have recently implemented a TOF-B rho technique and performed mass measurements of neutron-rich nuclides in the Fe region, important for r-process calculations and for calculations of processes occurring in the crust of accreting neutron stars.