Nanomagnetics Instruments, a Turkish nanotechnology company, has started selling microscopes that are able to map surfaces at nanometric and atomic levels to the U.S. space agency, NASA, the company's general director said on Thursday.

Dr. Ahmet Oral, who also teaches physics at Middle East Technical University, said that the microscope has a wide range of uses for physics, chemistry, materials science and industrial engineering and is used by scientific research institutions

Oral said that the company's customers are usually overseas firms and scientific research institutions. Nanomagnetics started developing the microscope as part of a project supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK) in the early 1990s.

International customers of Nanomagnetics are drawn to the brand's microscope due to its higher quality and cheaper price compared to the products of its competitors.

"There are almost 30 firms doing this work, ten of them are active and we are among these active firms," Oral said, adding that the company aims to be among the top three companies.

In addition to sales to NASA, the Ankara-based firm exports the microscope to Brazil, Chile, France, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Korea and Spain. The South Korean electronics giant Samsung is a also customer of Nanomagnetics.

Samsung is using the microscopes to see the results of their work on smartphone displays which have pixels as small as 10 microns in diameter.