9405438 Rossman This award provides one-half the funding required for the acquisition of components needed to modernize the electron microprobe instrument housed and operated in the Division of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. The institution is committed to providing the remaining funds necessary for this upgrade. The upgrade will provide new computer control and data processing and will allow the electron microprobe lab at Caltech to improve the reliability and analytical capabilities of the eight-year old instrument so that it performs comparably to modern equipment. The electron microprobe at Caltech is used primarily to obtain quantitative chemical composition, with micron scale spatial resolution, of geological and extra-terrestrial material samples needed for a wide variety of research projects in the geosciences. ***
