Electron Microprobe Facility Automation Upgrade

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9616827 Grove This grant provides $72,800 as partial support of the costs of upgrading the automation systems on each of two electron microprobes maintained at MIT's Center for Geochemical Analysis. While one of the EMP's was originally purchased in 1972 and has since been upgraded with an additional wavelength dispersive spectrometer (for a total of five), an additional used EMP was purchased in 1992 (EAR-918402) to alleviate demand on the original instrument. Both instruments are fully subscribed by a wide variety of regional researchers from MIT, WHOI, Boston University, Wellesley College and Harvard University to name a few. The purpose of this upgrade is to replace the antiquated and no longer supported Tracor Northern, DEC PDP-11 based automation systems which control both the stage and spectrometer drives on these EMP's and also control the electronics of the energy dispersive detectors (EDS) and additionally handle the data reduction and image analysis programs. These upgrades will ensure continued functionality of these EMP's and provide for state-of-the-art digital image analysis of backscattered electron images thus aiding these scientists to tackle fundamental problems in petrology and geochemistry such as studies of the growth and evolution of continental crust and the lithosphere, studies of magmatic processes within the crust, studies of the mechanical properties of partially molten rocks under varying condition of temperature, stress and lithostatic pressure, petrologic investigations into the formation history of mantle peridotites, the nature of hydrothermal alteration of oceanic crust and studies of carbonate diagenesis. ***