Martian rover tech has an eye for art

Will Ferguson, reporter

Just because NASA's Curiosity rover is busy preparing to trundle over the surface of Mars doesn't mean it can't help out scientists on its home world as well. An X-ray diffraction and fluorescence instrument the robot uses to study the composition of rock on the Red Planet's surface has found an application in an unlikely field: art conservation.

The instrument caught the eye of Giacomo Chiari, chief scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, as a potentially valuable means to examine priceless works of art without damaging them.

Determining the composition of ancient sculptures, paintings and buildings helps conservationists like Chiari to come up with ways to preserve pieces against the ravages of time. Until recently, though, only a few instruments were available to determine the composition of ancient artefacts without cutting out physical samples.

Curiosity's instrument directs a beam of X-rays at objects and reads the radiation scattered back to determine what the object is made of in a matter of minutes.

Chiari contacted the instrument's designer, California-based company inXitu, to adapt and build a a more portable instrument for art analysis. The new instrument, dubbed the X-Duetto, can examine objects while preserving their integrity and fits comfortably into a few briefcase-sized boxes. It is now being used by Getty scientists to analyse a large collection of museum antiques and the Roman ruins of Herculaneum, Italy.