A scientist working with NASA visited The Macaulay Institute this week to assess the suitability of an advanced piece of analytical instrumentation for use in a project to Mars.

The visiting scientist, Dr Philippe C. Sarrazin, is part of the team designing the CheMin XRD-XRF (X-Ray Diffraction/X-Ray Fluorescence) instrument that NASA will send to Mars in 2009 to examine the mineral and chemical composition of rocks there in the search for evidence of life.

The project, which is being developed at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley , California, requires a laboratory XRD to use as a calibration facility for CheMin.

Dr Sarrazin, who is in charge of setting up this system, is visiting Dr Stephen Hillier, a mineralogist at The Macaulay Institute to learn from his experiences with a new state of the art XRD installed in the Institute’s Environmental Sciences Laboratory.

Dr Hillier commented: “XRD is used extensively in the Macaulay Institute’s research program to identify minerals in soils and in sediments. Some recent examples include the identification of minerals hosting chromium (a highly toxic metal) in contaminated land in Glasgow , and the identification of forms of phosphorus (a major nutrient) in sheep dung.

“The Macaulay’s XRD lab also engages in a wide range of commercial work through Macaulay Enterprises Ltd in support of local and international businesses, particularly the oil industry. Here XRD is used to analyse rocks, drill cuttings and cements, but also corrosion products (rusts) and scales (deposits) which once identified can help to determine why something is corroding, or blocking up offshore.”

The Macaulay Institute is the premier land use research institute in the UK. Two hundred and seventy staff are based at the Macaulay Institute at Craigiebuckler in Aberdeen. The Macaulay Institute aims to be an international leader in research on the use of rural land resources for the benefit of people and the environment and is involved in research across the globe; from Scotland to Chile and China. More about the Macaulay Institute can be found at www.macaulay.ac.uk .

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