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PIA05111: Powerful Yet Tiny Machine
This image taken at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows the Moessbauer spectrometer, an instrument on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit that detects iron-bearing minerals in martian rocks and soil.
 Mission:  Mars Exploration Rover (MER) 
 Spacecraft:  Spirit
 Instrument:  Moessbauer Spectrometer 
 Product Size:  756 x 716 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  JPL 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA05111.tif (1.454 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA05111.jpg (51.45 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

This image taken at JPL shows the Moessbauer spectrometer, an instrument on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit that detects iron-bearing minerals in martian rocks and soil. Located on the rover's instrument deployment device, or "arm," this machine uses two pieces of radioactive cobalt-57, each about the size of pencil erasers, to determine with a high degree of accuracy the composition and abundance of iron-bearing minerals too difficult to detect by other means.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/University of Mainz

Image Addition Date:
2004-01-20