There is considerable interest in ultra-high temperature ceramics (e.g. HfC, ZrB2) as thermal protection materials, where the temperatures of interest may be well above 3000 K, in a range where conventional surface chemistry or furnace methods for surface kinetics are difficult or impossible. The upper temperature limit of the single NP mass spectrometry method is, in principle, determined only by the material, i.e., by the requirement that the NP must not immediately vaporize. The method is based on work of Gerlich and co-workers, and uses a splitring quadrupole ion trap of their design to monitor NP mass (M) over time in both inert and reactive atmospheres.