Meet the Prof - Ralf Gellert

My name is Ralf Gellert.
I'm an Associate Professor here at the Pphysics Department at the University of Guelph.
I came to Guelph in 2005.
That was after I led a proposal to NASA to get a Canadian built instrument on the newest Mars Rover.
And I teamed up with a professor here from Guelph and with a company from Brampton MDA and the Canadian Space Agency who supported my ideas how to make the so-called APXS: Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer better for the next mission.
The APXS is an instrument about the size of a soup can, a little soup can that determines the composition, chemical composition of a rock or soil that you put it close to.
It does this with a physics method called X-ray fluoresence where you shoot X-rays at the sample and the atoms in the sample react by emitting their own characteristic X-rays and we detect this with an X-ray detector and we count.
We get so many iron silicon X-rays and we can tell there's so much iron so much silicon in it.
So, it's a small geologic instrument that tells you what the rock is made of, which also tells geologists what the rock saw in the past.