Question: What is the best equipment you have used?

Natasha Stephen answered on 23 Jun 2014:

The best equipment I’ve used would be the Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire. It’s a type of particle accelerator and one of the world’s largest synchrotron radiation facilities! Scientists can use it to study various samples in really good detail as the synchrotron generates particles of really high energy that are fantastic at focusing certain types of analyses!

I use these in my work to look at the different crystals within my rocks from Mars; they all have a slightly different composition and structure and the synchrotron at Diamond lets me look at this really close up without having to damage the sample at all! It’s a bit like a super-charged X-ray machine!