Mossbauer spectroscopy of extraterrestrial materials

Mossbauer Spectroscopy (MS) has recently been added to the tools used by Dr. Richard Morris of the Experimental Planetology Branch of the Solar System Exploration Division at Johnson Space Flight Center in his research on synthetic and natural analogs of lunar and Martian soils. A least-squares fitting program for MS data written originally for an IBM 360 Mainframe computer was adapted for use on an IBM-PC microcomputer. The adapted program has been applied to the analysis of MS spectra obtained from several samples of Antarctic soil under investigation at JSC as analogs to soil of the Martian regolith. Preliminary conclusions have been drawn from the MS data about the composition of the Antarctic samples. Inferences from optical spectra obtained for these same samples have been compared with the MS results.