DESCRIPTION |
Spectroscopic data acquired in RELAB provide the interpretive foundation
upon which compositional information about unexplored or unsampled planetary surfaces
is derived from remotely obtained reflectance spectra. The Keck/NASA Reflectance
Experiment Laboratory (RELAB, http://planetary.brown.edu/relab/) is
supported by NASA as a multi-user spectroscopy facility, and laboratory time can
be made available at no charge to investigators who are in funded NASA programs.
RELAB has two operational spectrometers available to NASA scientists:
1) a near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared bidirectional spectrometer and
2) a near- and mid- infrared FT-IR spectrometer.
The overall purpose of the design and operation of the RELAB bidirectional
spectrometer is to obtain high precision, high spectral resolution, bidirectional
reflectance spectra of earth and planetary materials. One of the key elements of
its design is the ability to measure samples using viewing geometries specified by
the user. This allows investigators to simulate the geometry of natural observing
conditions for particulate samples as small as 50 mg.
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