Thermal Infrared Spectral Laboratory and Mineral Library at ASU

http://tes.asu.edu/spectral/library/index.html

The TES instrument team maintains a Thermal Infrared Spectral Laboratory and Mineral Library at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, USA.

The library includes observations of terrestrial rock and mineral samples for comparison with the spectra of Mars returned by TES and also for interpreting remote sensing data collected with Earth as the target.

The links below lead to detailed information about the ASU facility and the contents of the Spectral Library.


ASU Thermal Infrared Spectroscopy Laboratory
ASU Thermal Emission Spectral Library

MGS Thermal Emission Spectrometer Data Archive & PDS TES Data Node

[caption id="attachment_846" align="aligncenter" width="500"] TES Silicate/High-Silicon Glass Abundance on a Portion of Mars. Image by ASU & TES[/caption]

MGS-TES Special Products

TES, The Thermal Emission Spectrometer at Arizona State University (ASU), is one of five instruments carried on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft (MGS).

MGS was launched in November 1996 and made the last transmission to Earth in November 2006.

Their website presents data from the TES instrument at Mars, as well as an introduction to infrared spectroscopy and access to the Spectral Library at Arizona State University.

You will also find links to many other Mars-related websites, including their very active ASU-Mars K-12 outreach program.

TES Bolometric Albedo Map

Emissivity as viewed on the Fuji & Co Piezo Science page

A brief explanation of the topic of emissivity, that gets into the concept of spectral emissivity... a little. It deals with the total emissivity used in radiant heat transfer, but the basic concepts apply at any wavelength.

Visit http://www.fuji-piezo.com/emissivi.htm online to read their explanation.

Ultra-thin perfect absorber employing a tunable phase change material

New device hides, on cue, from infrared cameras

November 26, 2012

Tunable material developed at Harvard boasts nearly 100% absorption on demand

Cambridge, Mass. - November 26, 2012 - Now you see it, now you don’t.

A new device invented at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) can absorb 99.75% of infrared light that shines on it. When activated, it appears black to infrared cameras.

Composed of just a 180-nanometer-thick layer of vanadium dioxide (VO₂) on top of a sheet of sapphire, the device reacts to temperature changes by reflecting dramatically more or less infrared light.

Announced today in the journal Applied Physics Letters, and featured on its cover, this perfect absorber is ultrathin, tunable, and exceptionally well suited for use in a range of infrared optical devices.

Perfect absorbers have been created many times before, but not with such versatile properties. In a Fabry-Pérot cavity, for instance, two mirrors sandwich an absorbing material, and light simply reflects light back and forth until it's mostly all gone. Other devices incorporate surfaces with nanoscale metallic patterns that trap and eventually absorb the light.

Reflectivity of Mineral Powders

From the Website of Ocean Optics, an applications note for their Jaz Spectrometer

It begins:

"Reflectance spectroscopy is a versatile technique than can be used to identify and characterize a range of powdered samples including mineral powders, grains in lunar samples, mining samples, natural deposits, soils and sediment core samples. In this application note, reflectance spectroscopy is used to characterize mineral powder samples.

"The Jaz spectrometer was used to acquire reflectance spectra for pure samples and powder mixtures to assess the power of reflectance spectroscopy to characterize mineral powder samples."

Figure-3-Experiment-Setup.jpg from the Ocean Optics Blog