(Roar of fire and wind as MSL enters Mars' atmosphere)
Estelle Dodson: When NASA's Mars Science Laboratory,
or MSL, lands on Mars the rover will have many
ambitious science goals.
Named Curiosity, the rover will land in Gale Crater.
This is an ideal spot to study the exposed rock
that offers us tantalizing clues about Mars' past.
One of the ten science instruments that Curiosity carries
is a unique analysis tool called CheMin,
short for "Chemistry and Mineralogy."
About the size of a large shoebox, this portable
laboratory will accurately define the mineral composition
of samples taken from the Martian soil and rocks.
Join us as we meet the team
at NASA Ames Research Center
who developed the CheMin instrument as well as
discover how this technology is proving to be indispensable
right here on Earth.
(Music) (Electronic Sounds of DataI)
Estelle: To tell us more about one of the instruments
on the Mars Science Laboratory, I'm here with
NASA Geologist David Blake.
He's the inventor and Principal Investigator
on the CheMin instrument.
David, can you tell us more about CheMin
and what it will be doing on MSL?
David Blake: Well, CheMin is an X-ray diffraction instrument
and this is the first time we've ever sent
an instrument like that into space.
X-ray diffraction is the gold standard for how to
analyze minerals on the Earth in a large laboratory.
So, for the first time ever we will be able to definitively
determine what minerals are present in rocks.
And by knowing that, we will understand the history
of the early Mars environment.
Gale Crater is one of the oldest and deepest craters
on the surface of Mars.
And we believe it has sedimentological records
that go back as far as four billion years.
Billion with a "B."
And the significance of that, is that on the Earth
with plate tectonics, we have no sediments that are
that old that we can really look at and interpret.
This is really the only way to look at a
four billion year old sediment and say how it formed
and what the conditions were at that time.
Estelle: How is this different than Spirit and
Opportunity that have come before?
David: Well, we're doing something similar to what Spirit
and Opportunity has done, but on a much larger scale.
Spirit and Opportunity were kind of like field geologists.
They would go out with a hand lens and a hammer
and look at rocks, maybe analyze the surface of a rock.
But, Mars Science Laboratory goes a step further
and we collect those rocks, collect powders, and we have
essentially a full up terrestrial laboratory inside the body
of Mars Science Laboratory and that's what's going to be different.
Estelle: How do you get a laboratory to fit on a
rover that's going to go to another planet?
David: Okay, well you have to make it small,
that's one thing, small and a lot less mass.
So, a regular diffractometer in the lab is about like
double-wide refrigerator-sized, with lots of
complicated motions of the detector, of the sample
and of the source.
We kind of had a new idea where we actually vibrate the sample
with a tuning fork, so that the sample itself does all the motions
and the machine doesn't have to.
So, we essentially went from a complicated big machine
with many moving parts to a small simple machine
with no moving parts.
Estelle: What's the most exciting thing about CheMin
flying on MSL for you?
David: So I've been doing diffraction, I've been
working in the business for thirty-five years
and so having this kind of come to fruition finally
is really exciting to me.
Estelle: To tell us more about this technology,
we're meeting with Philippe Sarrazin,
who helped develop the CheMin instrument.
He is now the Chief Scientist at InXitu, a division
of Olympus that is commercializing the technology.
Philippe, what is X-ray diffraction?
Is it similar to regular X-ray imaging techniques?
Philippe Sarrazin: It's actually quite different.
X-ray diffraction is a method for analyzing
crystalline materials.
Every crystal, every type of crystal has a
very unique signature in X-ray diffraction.
Crystals are everywhere around us.
They're in geological materials, but they're also in
man-made materials such as metals, or ceramics
or concrete, or even pharmaceutical products.
So by using our instruments we can identify
the nature of the crystals inside a sample.
I can take an example of, you know, two materials
that are very much alike, but very much different.
Two materials that are made out of 100 percent of carbon:
one is graphite and the other one is diamond.
X-ray diffraction can tell the difference between
diamond and graphite where traditional
chemical analyzers would see carbon.
Estelle: Tell us how the CheMin instrument evolved
into a commercially produced product.
Philippe: I used to work with David Blake at NASA
and we developed a number of prototypes to
demonstrate the capability of the technology.
In the process of doing that we had the chance
to test our instruments in the field and it was the
first time X-ray diffraction was taken out of the lab.
Seeing the capability that geologists could use
on the site was quite a revelation that there were
a number of commercial applications that could
be derived from that technology.
Estelle: And what types of areas is it being used in?
Philippe: So we released our first product in 2007,
it's called Terra.
And Terra is being used by a number of scientists
and engineers in very different fields such as geology obviously,
but also the oil industry for oil drilling, in mining
or even the pharmaceutical industry or museums.
Estelle: How is it being used in a museum?
Philippe: The objective was to have an instrument
that could analyze surface materials,
mostly pigments in works of art such as paintings
and frescoes or sculptures and non-destructively.
Terra and CheMin are both destructive instruments,
you need to sample and grind that sample.
Which obviously would be a problem
when you are analyzing a very expensive
and rare work of art. (Laughs)
Estelle: What are some of the more interesting
works of art that you've been able to see?
Philippe: So that instrument was taken into unique sites,
such as King Tut's tomb or the Acropolis in Athens.
Estelle: What do you see as the future
of the CheMin technology?
Philippe: What's unique about what we've created for this
Mars project as well as for the commercial spin-off,
is that there's nothing in the world, other than
what we've developed, that allows doing these analyses
in the field and almost instantly you get answers
within minutes or tens of minutes.
It really opens new horizons for some applications,
whether they're scientific or industrial,
so there's a lot of potential for the technique
that was developed for CheMin.
Estelle: Thanks for joining us!
And meet us again on our next Destination Innovation.
For more information about the CheMin instrument
please visit NASA dot gov slash Ames.
(Electronic Sounds of Data) (Musical Tones)