We report on our investigation into the development of electrostatic mirror based charged particle analyzers for space plasma physics experimentation. For this work, we tested an elliptical mirror analyzer which was designed to provide a wide, 2-dimensional field of view with high throughput and good angular resolution. Measurements with an ion beam demonstrated 2° full width at half-maximum angular resolution over a 16×16° field of view (FOV) and 4° resolution over a 40×40° FOV for an optical system with a linear dimension (entrance aperture to the particle detector) of 20 cm. The energy resolution is variable, similar in operation to a retarding-potential-analyzer or a modulated grid Faraday cup, with a geometric factor of 3.2×10−3cm2str&Dgr;E/Efor an energy resolution setting of 10&percent;. ©1997 American Institute of Physics.