Star Trek-style ‘tricorder’ — invented by a Canadian — can analyse rocks, plants and animals
Tom Spears
Sun
A Canadian geoscientist has invented a Star Trek-style “tricorder” — his own word — that can scan the surface of other planets and identify the rocks without having to stop and grind up pieces in a lab.
It can also analyse plants, animals, and probably other materials.
The hand-held device will be ready for NASA’s next Mars lander, a robotic mission to be launched in 2009.
It shines a laser beam at a rock sample, which “excites” the atoms in the rock, or raises them to a more energetic state. These atoms then give off a weak light in a wavelength unique to each type of rock, like a fingerprint.
All the tricorder needs is an internal catalogue to tell it which wavelength comes from a diamond and which comes from cubic zirconia. It’s also a bit short-sighted; it can only analyse rocks that are close to it.
Scientists call this spectral analysis. It’s the same field in which Canada’s Gerhard Herzberg won a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The tricorder is the brainchild of Bob Downs, a Canadian professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
It’s designed to be useful for a geologist or prospector in the field to identify rocks, gems or other minerals.
“But it goes much farther than that,” Downs says. “I sent one of my students out around our building, and he recorded all the different leaves, so you can do species of plants with it.
“We have someone who has a collection of snakeskins. We shot all the different skins.”
In other words, the technique of analysing the spectrum of each type of material can go far outside the rock world. Even, he acknowledges, to space aliens.
Like Star Trek’s Klingons, perhaps?
“Well, first you have to have the spectrum in the catalogue [of known materials], so you’d have to bring me one first,” he says. But in principle, he thinks the tricorder could handle it.
That matches the wild assortment of duties that Star Trek got from its hand-held gadget. The tricorder could trouble-shoot a wonky machine, find people (or aliens), and even diagnose disease.
NASA hasn’t said it will definitely take the tricorder to Mars. It funded four scientists in the research, and Mr. Downs is one of them — the only one, he claims, to have a hand-held model the size of a cell phone.
Rocks on Mars won’t be a lot different from earth rocks, he believes. “Mars has a bit more manganese, a bit more iron” than Earth.
“I’d be surprised if we found something we don’t know. But we’ll probably find a different distribution of minerals.”
The geoscientist was to present his machine Sunday to the annual Pittsburgh conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy.
Downs is from Dawson Creek and Nanaimo, and did 10 years of construction work around the province before going back to university.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
