NASA/JPL After a few dry runs, the Curiosity rover has now put its chemistry set to use at a site called the Rock Garden. For the first time, we’ve operated an X-ray diffraction system on another planet, telling us something about the structure of the minerals in the Martian soil. The first results tell us the sand the rover has driven through contains some material that wouldn’t be out of place near a volcano on Earth. Curiosity comes equipped with a scoop that lets it pick up loose soil from the Martian surface and drop it into a hatch on the main body. From there, the samples can be directed into a variety of chemistry labs. Yesterday, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed the first results obtained by the Chemistry and Mineralogy (or CheMin) instrument, the first time anything of this kind has been operated on another planet. We have a lot of ways to look at the composition of the material on Mars’ surface. We can look at the absorption of light by materials (including from orbit), which can tell us a lot about its likely composition. The rover itself has a number of spectrometers, which can also tell us about the chemical composition of rocks, as well as wet and dry chemistry labs. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Curiosity’s first chem test: Sands of Mars taste a lot like volcano
Dupple writes in with news about a discovery that should extend the life of your battery in the near future. “Powering cellular base stations around the world will cost $36 billion this year—chewing through nearly 1 percent of all global electricity production. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals. The versions of amplifiers within smartphones suffer similar problems. If you’ve noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers. As with the versions in base stations, these chips waste more than 65 percent of their energy—and that’s why you sometimes need to charge your phone twice a day. It’s currently a lab-bench technology, but if it proves itself in commercialization, which is expected to start in 2013—first targeting LTE base stations—the technology could slash base station energy use by half. Likewise, a chip-scale version of the technology, still in development, could double the battery life of smartphones.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.