During its brief window of intense scientific data collection, New Horizons' seven instruments are scheduled to gather information that will be studied for years to come, including measurements that will reveal the height of Pluto's mountains, the depths of its valleys and the temperature of its surface.
While analysis of data collected before 2016 hinted at the presence of a planet, it took a further intense round of data collection earlier this year before the discovery could be confirmed.
The study required several years of intense biogeochemical and hydrological data collection in Bigelow Brook by Harvard Forest collaborators William Sobczak from the College of the Holy Cross, and James Saiers, Peter Raymond, and Henry Wilson from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
But the data collection requirement was met with intense criticism from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups that argued it put an unfair and expensive burden on employers.
The MPL is located at the new British synchrotron, Diamond Light Source, which provides a source of intense, highly focused X-rays necessary for crystal screening and data collection on challenging crystals.
Following the regulatory approvals, intense community engagement activities were pursued by the NHRC before initiating data collection in the field (22).
Why? Traditional and government-led data collection such as censuses and surveys are resource-intense, take a lot of time to implement and are sensitive to scaling.
The 23-IDD beamline uses dual-canted undulators to produce intense X-ray radiation and is equipped with a MarMosaic CCD detector for data collection.
As synchrotron radiation becomes more intense, detectors become faster and structure-solving software becomes more elaborate, obtaining single crystals suitable for data collection is now the bottleneck in macromolecular crystallography.
