In the near future NASA intends to explore various regions of our solar system using robotic devices such as rovers, spacecraft, airplanes, and/or balloons. Such platforms will carry imaging devices, and a variety of analytical instruments intended to evaluate the chemical and mineralogical nature of the environment(s) that they encounter. The imaging and/or spectroscopic devices will acquire t...

Monitoring of body burden of toxic elements is usually based on analysis of concentration of particular elements in blood, urine and/or hair. Analysis of these matrices, however, predominantly reflects short- or medium-term exposure to trace elements or pollutants. In this work, urinary stones were investigated as a matrix for monitoring long-term exposure to toxic and essential elements. A tot...

Environmentally and technologically sulphur is a deleterious constitute in coal which makes it unsuitable for use in metallurgical industries unless the sulphur level can be reduced to the tolerable limit. Characterization of the various forms of sulphur and their associations in coal is an essential issue to find and propose a suitable desulphurization method. In this research, to evaluate sul...

This study combines spaceborne multitemporal and hyperspectral data to analyze the spatial distribution of surface evaporite minerals and changes in a semi-arid depositional environment associated with episodic flooding events, the Omongwa salt pan (Kalahari, Namibia). The dynamic of the surface crust is evaluated by a change-detection approach using the Iterative-reweighted Multivariate Altera...

Remedial technologies utilized at hazardous waste sites for the treatment of metal and metalloid contaminants often take advantage of reduction-oxidation (redox) processes to reach ground water clean up goals (Barcelona and Holm, 1991; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2002). This is because redox reactions, in many cases, govern the biogeochemical behavior of inorganic contaminants by affe...

Geochemical analysis of the surface material of terrestrial type planets is of fundamental importance in understanding the geological context of the planetary environment. Consequently this analysis should be performed whenever possible and indeed this has occurred on a number of previous landers. Current techniques include X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and Rutherford back-scattering of alpha partic...

Bioaccessibility tests and mineralogical analyses were performed on arsenic-contaminated tailings and soils from gold mine districts of Nova Scotia, Canada, to examine the links between soil composition, mineralogy, and arsenic bioaccessibility. Arsenic bioaccessibility ranges from 0.1% to 49%. A weak correlation was observed between total and bioaccessible arsenic concentrations, and the arsen...

The thermal properties such as specific heat capacity and heat dissipation of peloids play an important role in therapeutic applications. Therefore, these properties were determined on the peloids samples taken from spas where peloid applications are used in Turkey. In addition, some pure clay minerals were investigated to determine their suitability as possible constituents of therapeutic pelo...

Quantitative determination of the mineralogical composition of hydrothermally altered rocks was performed by means of the Rietveld method using X-ray powder-diffraction data. Initially, experiments were carried out to minimize systematic errors arising from preferred orientation of particles as well as micro-absorption. The precision of the proposed method was tested by independent replicate sa...

Introduction: The compositions of Martian (SNC) meteorites provide geochemical parameters thought to be diagnostic for Mars [1,2]. The validity of these geochemical fingerprints is important because SNC element ratios are the basis for estimates of the planet’s bulk composition [3]. The compositions of minerals in these meteorites are distinct from terrestrial rocks and are also hypothesized to...