December
3, 2004
Global
Studies Summer Fellows Help Create Mineral Database
Photo
by: Todd M. LeMieux
Kylie Hanify ’06
|
By Ember Oparowski ’07
Yarrow Rothstein ’06 and Kylie Hanify ’06 have spent
their college careers inextricably linked to a Mossbauer spectrometer.
Their four-year internship with Darby Dyar, associate professor
of astronomy and geology, requires them to change samples in
the Mossbauer and accurately record results.
A Mossbauer spectrometer analyzes samples and determines the composition and
abundance of iron within a sample. “During the summer following our first
year, we would wake up at 2 am to change the Mossbauer samples, and then have
to be up at 8 am to go to work,” Rothstein said.
This summer Rothstein and Hanify were lucky enough to travel to the Natural
History Museum in London to conduct X-ray diffraction research. This research
requires smaller samples and is a quicker test than the Mossbauer, which usually
takes at least eight hours. In London, they ran numerous tests on different
kinds of olivine, a mineral thought to be abundant on Mars, and also cataloged
a plethora of minerals located in drawers at the Natural History Museum that
hadn’t been looked at in 50 years. Cataloging the museum’s minerals
was not an unfamiliar task: they had cataloged Dyar’s extensive specimen
collection in their first year at MHC.
Photo
by: Todd M. LeMieux
Yarrow Rothstein ’06
|
The purpose of Rothstein and Hanify’s summer research, funded by the
College’s new Global Studies Summer Fellowship Program, was to help Dyar
and Olwyn Menzies, a postdoctoral research associate at the Imperial College
London, prove a theory on which they are currently working. Rothstein and Hanify
stressed the importance of their access to the Natural History Museum’s
mineral collection, among the largest in the world, which contains approximately
350,000 specimens and dates back to 1660.
A grant from NASA had enabled Dyar and her research assistants to create
a Mossbauer database of different mineral spectra at various temperatures. “The
Mossbauer database we are creating is the only publicly accessible resource
for data on Mossbauer spectra of minerals over a range of temperatures. The
6,500-plus hits on our Web site in the last year testify to its importance
to the scientific community,” Dyar said. “We could not interpret
the data from the Mars Exploration Rovers without this important resource,
and it could not have been created without the help of Kylie and Yarrow.” Hanify
pointed to a larger goal of their research: “Once we find out what
minerals are on Mars, if there is or was water on Mars, we will be able to
determine if there is or was life on Mars.”
Rothstein, an astronomy and physics major, anticipates working on her thesis
about the minerals that make up Mars and awaits the NASA results. Hanify, a
geology major, is writing her thesis on chlorites and is currently analyzing
chlorites that
will be run on the Mossbauer in the future.
“Yarrow and Kylie share some qualities that will make them successful at
whatever they choose to do, but that are especially well suited to working in
the chaotic atmosphere of my laboratory,” Dyar said. “They work
hard, are extremely dependable, and most important, they care deeply about
the quality of data we produce. I am incredibly lucky to have the chance to
work with them throughout their careers here at Mount Holyoke.”
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