REU 2013 Blog: Emily Prince-Ralby

Emily in the Lab

July 9, 2013

Now in the third week of her internship, Emily’s been getting more hands-on time in the lab. Under geochemist and Florida State University Associate Professor Munir Humayun’s supervision, she’s using the MagLab's geochemistry’s Neptune machine to identify titanium isotopes in different rock samples. She’s going to use rocks from the Earth, Moon and Mars. Since Martian and Moon rock samples aren’t always easy to get, it’s fortunate that she needs only minute amounts to run her tests

“We just got about 200 mg of a Hawaiian volcanic rock called basalt — an amount about the size of a Tylenol capsule — and after we dissolve it and extract the titanium, we can run about 400 different samples,” she says.

With such tiny sample sizes, the Neptune — one of the many isotope ratio mass spectrometers in the lab — has to be carefully adjusted and maintained.

“The last time Munir did these kind of samples he could only get 10 parts per million (ppm), so we’re trying to get it even more precise,” Emily says. “We’re setting the machine to detect 5 ppm.”

Emily and her team are studying titanium and its isotopes to find evidence for an age-old hypothesis: the Giant Impact Hypothesis. Also known as Big Splash, this theory claims that the Moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago from a massive collision between the Earth and another Mars-sized planet.

They’re just finishing their measurement standards and will start their first tests this week. But they won’t put samples in the Neptune just yet.

“Before we can test for titanium, we have to break the sample’s bonds with the other elements,” she explains. “That’s why we do different acid washes — hydrochloric, hydrofluoric, and nitric acids — to strip away the other stuff and leave just titanium.”

The Neptune displays its data as a line graph with many different peaks. Each peak represents a different particle’s mass. This is how they can determine the chemical makeup of a sample compound. Her team knows what the terrestrial and lunar samples will look like under the machine, and they hope the Martian samples will look the same.

We’ll check back with Emily after she’s done some more testing.

--- by Christopher Hill, FSU intern

Meet Emily

June 17, 2013

Emily Prince-Ralby, 19, found her spark for engineering and problem-solving working with a robotics club during her high-school years in Coral Gables, Florida.

“It was my first interaction with engineers,” the biomedical engineering major at Florida State University said. “It was a lot of fun.”

During her freshman year at FSU, she did a spring semester mentorship with MagLab scientist Munir Humayun in the geochemistry lab. She enjoyed it so much she applied for the lab’s summer Research for Undergraduates (REU) program.

Each REU student accepted into the prestigious program is matched with a scientist. Emily was one of the 179 undergraduates who applied, and one of the 24 accepted. She also was lucky enough to have Humayun, an FSU professor in geochemistry, as her mentor again.

During her first week, she began learning how to use a special mass spectrometer — a machine that can identify isotopes by their mass — in order to examine meteorite samples. She’ll eventually use this powerful, multimillion-dollar machine to look for 50_Titanium isotope excesses, which hold clues to the origin of the Moon. Her findings could help theorize the giant impact hypothesis, i.e., the idea that the Moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago from a massive collision between the Earth and another Mars-sized planet.

Only in her first week, Emily hasn’t had too much direct exposure in the lab. She’s had her nose in machine manuals more than her hands in lunar dirt. But self-motivated and eager to learn, she’s fueled by her newfound freedom. We’ll check back with her after a week or so and see how she’s doing.

--- by Christopher Hill, FSU intern