NASA Investigative Chemistry Laboratory (NICL)
Capabilities/Specialized Equipment
- Wet Chemistry Laboratory with suite of capabilities including:
- Chemical fume hoods, bench space, eyewash/safety shower
- Precision analytical balances
- Rotary evaporator, Soxhlet extractor, and RapidVap heated vacuum evaporator
- Autotitrator
- Melting point/boiling point determinator
- pH/conductivity probes
- Refrigerated centrifuge
- Drying oven, muffle furnace, and vacuum oven
- Microwave and hot block digestors
- Heated water baths and sonicators
- Gas pycnometer and rotational viscometer
- Sample Preparation
- Plasma Etcher
- Gold coater with carbon accessory
- Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) system
- Sample sectioning equipment
- Microscopy:
- Optical stereomicroscopes with coaxial illumination
- Transmitted polarized light microscope
- Fluorescence microscope (Blue-Green-UV)
- Scanning electron microscope with energy and wavelength dispersive spectrometers (SEM-EDS/WDS)
- Single particle handling and analysis techniques
- Spectroscopy/Spectrometry:
- Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) equipped with microscope, attenuated total reflectance (ATR), horizontal ATR (HATR – flat and trough), and diffuse reflectance (DRIFTS) accessories
- Raman spectrometer
- X-ray Diffraction (XRD)
- Micro x-ray fluorescence (µ-XRF)
- Portable x-ray fluorescence (XRF)
- Inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer (ICP-OES)
- Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS)
- Glow Discharge Spectrometer
- Carbon/sulfur analyzer
- Direct Analysis Real Time (DART) analyzer with time of flight (TOF) mass spectrometer
- Chromatography:
- Ion chromatograph (IC) with suppressed conductivity detection for anions and cations
- High performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC) with diode array detector, refractive index detector, fluorescence detector, and post-column derivatization system
- Gas Chromatography: Multiple gas chromatography (GC) systems equipped with:
- Liquid, headspace/gas, and solid phase microextraction (SPME) autosamplers
- Single and triple quadrupole mass spectrometers (MS)
- Flame ionization detector (FID), electron capture detector (ECD), thermal conductivity detector (TCD), and photoionization detector (PID)
- Cryogenic preconcentrator for trace level gas detection
Chemists Misle Tessema (left) and Macy Mullen (right) discuss scanning electron microscope operations inside NASA Engineering’s Analytical Laboratories at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 7, 2021. One of seven branches in the NASA Laboratories, Development, and Testing Division, the Analytical Laboratories branch provides microscopic imagery and analysis through the use of a wide variety of microscopic techniques to identify contaminants and other urgent problems associated with aerospace flight hardware, ground support equipment, and related facilities.
NASA/KSC
Chemist Trey Barnes prepares a gas sample for injection into a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry system preconcentrator for analyzing trace level gas contaminants inside NASA Engineering’s Analytical Laboratories at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 7, 2021. One of seven branches in the NASA Laboratories, Development, and Testing Division, the Analytical Laboratories branch provides microscopic imagery and analysis through the use of a wide variety of microscopic techniques to identify contaminants and other urgent problems associated with aerospace flight hardware, ground support equipment, and related facilities.
NASA/KSC
NASA/KSC
