Heather emailed right before I left for my internship saying that she would be late coming in today, so I braved the snowy weather to start my day cleaning a capsule with Daniele. We went into the furnace room where we removed the capsule with barite in it that we had made last time before taking it to the lab to recycle the sulfur-34 and remove the crystal. While there, Daniele told me that Heather had been able to find the barite crystal that had gone flying out of the tweezers last week. This is great, because now with two barite crystals, Daniele can start to make a profile on this sulfate that she has never experimented with before in order to figure out a basic idea of how sulfur diffuses through barite. The crystal didn't give us too much trouble when removing it from the capsule though it did have to go in the ultrasonic a few times, but we quickly had the crystal extracted in no time. At this point Heather had showed up, and we decided to hunt down a few more sulfates to experiment on. After hunting down several different keys, we opened the display case outside the lab and sneakily chiseled away at some of the minerals. Dr. Bruce Watson had given Daniele two containers of barite, so we now had quite the collection of sulfates.
The picture on the left is all of our sulfates with the two barite minerals on top and our thieved minerals below. The minerals we chipped away at are gypsum and celestite. Celestite in the picture on the right is on the left and was in small crystals forming a large mineral. Celestite is a strontium sulfate. The gypsum is the rightmost container and is a calcium sulfate that also contains water. The crystal we took those small chips from was huge and had to weight about 40 pounds. It was a very soft mineral so it was pretty easy to chip off a few flaky pieces and head back to the lab. Daniele decided for us to use one of the barite crystals Dr. Watson had give us, and after looking at a nice crystal with a flat surface under the microscope we saw the crystals were very good quality with hardly any inclusions. We were running out of tube to form capsules with, so with a diamond cutter that looked a lot like a pen except with a small diamond for the tip, I cut a few tubes and sealed the bottoms with the Bunsen burner to create one half of the capsule. After placing these tube in the drying oven to remove any moisture within the tube, I placed my barite crystal and sulfur-34 within the tube. I used the vacuum to evacuate the capsule, I quickly sealed it off and had a ready-to-go capsule. It was then time for me to run so before the capsule had even cooled, I had to run out the lab in order to make it to the shuttle on time. Daniele is going to get some more data from the crystals on Monday when she uses the ion beam and hopefully I'll be able to look at some of this data next week. I'm also looking forward to doing some more experiments with different sulfates.
Kelsie, you seem fully engaged and very productive in your lab. I am impressed with how easily you move between different lab skills. You are cutting and sealing like a pro!
ReplyDeleteI am relieved that the crystal was found. That was suspenseful!
Looking forward to the next blog post.