Avoiding slush for hot-point drilling of glacier boreholesHill’s, B.H., D.P. Winebrenner, W.T. Elam, and P.M.S. Kintner, “Avoiding slush for hot-point drilling of glacier boreholes,” Ann. Glaciol., 62, 166-170, doi:10.1017/a0g.2020.70, 2021.Water-filled boreholes in cold ice refreeze in hours to days, and prior attempts to keep them open with antifreeze resulted in a plug of slush effectively freezing the hole even faster. Thus, antifreeze as a method to stabilize hot-water boreholes has largely been abandoned. In the hot-point drilling case, no external water is added to the hole during drilling, so earlier antifreeze injection is possible while the drill continues melting downward.…
Posts Tagged «bioshow_elam»
The XRFS was built by APL-UW under a NASA contract from the Langley Research Center; it is designed to be deployed down a pre-drilled hole for exploration and elemental analysis of subsurface planetary regolith.
Because of the yearlong COVID-19 pandemic, the hundreds of scientists and engineers behind the Perseverance rover mission have had to work almost exclusively from home. On the big day, only a minimal crew of ground controllers will be on duty at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. APL-UW Physicist Tim Elam, too, will be watching from home on February 18th.
In-situ X-ray fluorescence to investigate iodide diffusion in opalinus clay: Demonstration of a novel experimental approachJaquenoud, M., and 9 others including W.T. Elam, “In-situ X-ray fluorescence to investigate iodide diffusion in opalinus clay: Demonstration of a novel experimental approach,” Chemosphere, 269, doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2020.128674, 2021.During the last two decades, the Mont Terri rock laboratory has hosted an extensive experimental research campaign focusing on improving our understanding of radionuclide transport within Opalinus Clay. The latest diffusion experiment, the Diffusion and Retention experiment B (DR-B) has been designed based on an entirely different concept compared to all predecessor experiments. With its novel experimental methodology,…
Tim Elam is an expert on X-ray fluorescence at UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. So when scientists and engineers were brought onto the team for Perseverance’s Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL, Elam was a natural addition.
Optimized Compton fitting and modeling for light element determination in micro-X-ray fluorescence map datasetsO’Neil, L.P., D.C. Cating, and W.T. Elam, “Optimized Compton fitting and modeling for light element determination in micro-X-ray fluorescence map datasets,” Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res., Sect. B, 436, 173-178, doi:10.1016/j.nimb.2018.09.023, 2018.The Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) is an X-ray fluorescence instrument scheduled to fly to Mars on NASA’s 2020 rover (Allwood et al., 2015). It will be capable of quantifying elements with an atomic number of at least 11 using X-ray fluorescence (XRF), but the detector window blocks fluorescence from lighter elements. Important elements otherwise…
PIXL Blasts Off for MarsPIXL is an X-ray spectrometer integrated into the Perseverance rover that landed on Mars in February 2021. Up front and center on the rover’s robotic arm, PIXL will measure the microstructure of rocks in search of fossils and evidence of ancient Martian microbial life.
University of Washington professor and physicist Tim Elam explained on KIRO Nights that he is part of a team that designed an instrument to create chemical images of rocks on Mars. Elam says he’s been working on his portion of this project for more than eight years, from the original proposal for the instrument to now having hardware on the way to Mars.