Abstract
Measuring the surface composition of a planetary object (a planet, moon, or asteroid) is essential to our understanding of the formation and evolution of our solar system. Additionally, there are valuable resources in space that we will be able to mine in the future, and for that, we need to know the surface elemental composition with increasing resolution. Planetary Nuclear Spectroscopy makes use of radiation detectors (mostly gamma rays and neutrons) to measure the surface composition of planetary objects both from orbit and in-situ. I will discuss the history and the technology of nuclear spectrometers in space and will end with our efforts at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to develop an in-situ 3D elemental spectrometer with the use of Associated Particle Imaging (API) technology.

Bio

Mauricio Ayllon Unzueta, physicist research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was born in Bolivia. He has a BS in engineering physics from Eastern Michigan University (EMU), a master's in nuclear engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ), and a PhD in nuclear engineering from UC Berkeley. Unzueta worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a postdoc for 4 years, and then moved back to Berkeley as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.