  An emission tomography of laser-induced plasmas employed in the laser induced
breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) requires long signal integration times during
which the plasma cannot be considered stationary. To reduce the integration
time, it is proposed to measure a plasma absorption in parallel rays with an
aperture that collects light coming from large fractions of the plasma plume at
each aperture position. The needed spatial resolution is achieved by a special
numerical data processing. Another advantage of the proposed procedure is that
inexpensive linear CCD or non-discrete (PMT, photodiode) detectors can be used
instead of costly 2-dimensional detectors.
