Rio Tinto Field Trip

Perspectives

In its effort to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and know-how, CAREX plans to organise two field trips of which the first was held in the Rio Tinto area, Spain. This event provided an opportunity for 20 selected participants to interact in a field setting to demonstrate the use of selected technologies, compare methodologies, exchange research experiences and help promote harmonisation of techniques and methodologies.  Field work focussed on developing and evaluating new technologies of common use across Life in Extreme Environments research including remote sensing devices and field analysis of ecosystem.

The Workshop

The workshop, coordinated by the Centro de Astrobiologia (INTA-CAB), was held on September 21-23, 2009. Over the three days, two days were focussed on presentations and detailed discussions and one day dedicated to actual on-site demonstration of equipments.

In total, eight instruments were deployed in the study area of Rio Tinto:

• Mössbauer spectroscopy: H. Klingehöfer
• Raman Spectrometer: B. Foing
• ExoMars Raman: F. Rull 
• ExoMars LIBS (Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy)
• SOLID (Signs of Life Detection System): V. Parro
• Terra XRD/XRF: Xray diffraction : P. Sarrazin
• Hydrothermal vent biosampler (HVB): A. Behar
• FluoCam: J. Kviderova

Presentations on these instruments are provided below, a report detailling the workshop and its results will be produced in early 2010 and this work will be presented at the Astrobiology Science Conference (April 26-29, 2010 - League City, TX, USA)