I guess this would be a good time to introduce the instrument that I'm babysitting. We (my colleagues at inXitu and I) spent the summer building this instrument, so this is its maiden voyage. This version is the latest in a long pedigree of miniature X-ray diffraction instruments that David Blake and colleagues have been working on for the last 15 years or so. A parallel version is the one that has been selected for the Mars Science Laboratory mission that will be launched in late summer, 2009. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is building that version. Here is a movie of the MSL rover and CheMin.
Overall, we were very happy with the way the instrument performed, but it was nice to have a little downtime to fix small annoyances.
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