It is important to develop Martian soil simulants that can be used in Mars exploration programs and Mars research. A new Martian soil simulant, called Jining Martian Soil Simulant (JMSS-1), was developed at the Lunar and Planetary Science Research Center at the Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The raw materials of JMSS-1 are Jining basalt and Fe oxides (magnetite and hema...

The imaging spectrometer VIRTIS is the flight spare of the instrument of the same name on the Rosetta mission. It was refitted to be part of the Venus Express mission orbiting Venus since 2006. VIRTIS can observe nightside thermal emissions at the wavelengths of several atmospheric windows. In three of these windows atmospheric transparency is sufficient to allow a measurable amount of radiatio...

Introduction: One of the current goals of the Selenoligcal and Engineering Explorer “KAGUYA” (SELENE) and the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M, aboard Chadrayaan-1) missions is the accurate determination of surface composition. These data are being collected with the knowledge that when light interacts with an airless body surface it is either absorbed or reflected in a way unique to each of the most ...

The historic Penouta mine in northwest Spain is the focus of efforts to extract tantalum from tin mining waste. This paper describes the characterisation of the tantalum mineralogy of waste material from the deposit. Characterisation was realised using quantitative mineralogy and geochemistry. This paper further identifies other phases of interest and investigates the potential for extraction u...

Two types of bauxite occur in the Jajarm Bauxite deposit, the first one is the hard bauxite and the other is the shaly bauxite or soft bauxite. The Al 2 O 3 content ranges from 30% to 60% and SiO 2 varies between 5% to 39%.The total tonnage is more than 22 million tons with a mean value of Al 2 O 3 content between 47% to 48% , SiO 2 around 10% and Fe 2 O 3 ranges between 6.95 to 27% . The Jajar...

Department of Mineralogy, Petrography and Geochemistry is the oldest Earth science department at the AGH University of Science and Technology. It was created in 1919 as one of the first six departments of the Academy of Mining and was initially named as the Department of Mineralogy and Petrography. The Department was organized by Professor Józef Morozewicz (1865–1941) who chaired the Organizing...

In this article, we first present and discuss eighteenth-century descriptions of minerals that contributed decisively to the development of crystallography. Remarkably, these old crystallographic descriptions included morphologies with symmetries incompatible with an internal periodic order of atoms, which, however, have been recognised to be characteristics of quasicrystals. Moreover, we also ...

Seismic velocities are calculated for two petrological models of the upper mantle, an olivine-rich assemblage, pyrolite, and a garnet-clinopyroxene rich, olivine bearing, assemblage, piclogite. These are compared with recent seismic profiles for various tectonic provinces. The .shield data is most consistent with a cold olivine and orthopyroxene-rich LID (the seismic lithosphere) extending to 1...