At the AAAS meeting in San Diego, he showed off some of the tricks of his trade.His main tool is a device called a secondary-ion mass spectrometer.
Food grains, scraps of cloth, bits of wood and so on can thus be dated by finding out how much radioactive carbon is left in them: the less there is, the older they are.To measure this, archaeologists use a device called an accelerator mass spectrometer.
The 10cm cube sports an array of sensors including a magnetometer, camera, spectrometer and gamma-ray detector.
As more drops are sprayed on the same spot, some of this film is scattered and sucked into a mass spectrometer, which can identify the molecules collected.
That may produce more interesting results than Yutu's X-ray spectrometer, designed for regolith analysis, since many lunar samples retrieved by American and Soviet missions are already available for study on Earth.According to CNSA's blueprint, it too will bring Moon rocks back to Earth.
The likelihood that a mutant protein can slip through unnoticed is small: the spectrometer can tell apart proteins that differ by less than a tenth of a proton mass in weight.
This spacecraft has used not radar, but an instrument called a neutron spectrometer, which looks for ice less ambiguously by picking up telltale signs of hydrogen, one of the elements water contains.In this section An idea that clicked Prospects for lunar prospectors Quiet, please.
A spectrometer showed that the light most intensely reflected from the top of the animal's head had a wavelength of around 550 nanometres (which humans would perceive as greenish).
It cost about €300m ($370m) to construct and dispatch.Using a spectrometer that maps Mars in visible and infra-red light, Dr Bibring's team has been able to create a detailed mineralogical map of most of the Martian surface, parts of which have just been published in Science.
Each peptide has a weight that depends on whether it was produced from the original or the mutant virus.By feeding the entire mixture into the mass spectrometer, the researchers can quickly spot a peptide produced by a mutant.
One is a spectrometer that measures sunlight reflected from the Earth's surface.
