Is a portable scanning electron microscope possible?
Rogier Miltenburg, applications and product specialist at Thermo Fisher Scientific, always wondered just how versatile a desktop scanning electron microscope (SEM) could be. He recently got his answer when he transported the Thermo Scientific Phenom XL G2 Desktop SEM to the remote Selvagens Islands where he worked with a group of scientific researchers in a first-of-its-kind exploration of volcanic caves, considered the geological analogue to Mars.
Funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the “Microceno Project” brought 17 scientists together from seven countries around the globe—including researchers from the European Space Agency and a Russian cosmonaut—to pursue groundbreaking research that will inform future explorations in space.
Miltenburg joined the two-week expedition when project leader Ana Zélia Miller asked Thermo Fisher for a portable SEM to help the researchers analyze their samples on-site. “An SEM is an amazing tool to have because it’s super flexible for many applications like looking at sand, shells, bacteria, rocks,” says Miltenburg. “You can do anything you want, which makes it a good fit when you have no idea what you’re going to encounter.”
Researchers and facilitators who contributed to the “Microceno Project.”
Transporting the Phenom XL G2 SEM on a Navy boat
The Selvagens Islands are a rugged, uninhabited, and biodiverse archipelago north of the Canary Islands in the North Atlantic. Largely free from human disturbance, they are an authentic natural laboratory and their caves are seen as archives of time. The expedition was scheduled concurrently during the International Year of the Caves and the Selvagens Islands’ 50th anniversary as a natural reserve, bringing together research projects as diverse as microbiology, mineralogy, geology, biogeochemistry, paleoclimatology, and biotechnology for a multi-disciplinary study of the island and previously unexplored caves.
Miltenburg transported the Phenom XL G2 SEM by packing the microscope into two cubic-meter flight cases weighing a combined 130 kilos, and flying the SEM from Eindhoven, Netherlands to Funchal, Madeira via a commercial airline. The SEM was then transferred to a Portuguese Navy boat, where it traveled 300 km/180 miles by sea to its destination.
The COVID-19 pandemic limited the number of people allowed on the Navy boat and Miltenburg had to travel in a slower sailboat without accompanying the SEM.
A video of our Phenom XL G2 SEM being transported from the Navy boat into the dinghy, in which it made its final journey to the island.
When he reached the Selvagens Islands, he was relieved to see that the microscope had arrived safely and was sitting undisturbed on the shore. “This wasn’t just another tool,” Miltenburg says. “It was very special, and everyone was boasting that we were doing such a crazy thing as bringing an SEM to an island.”
Miltenburg was relieved to see that the microscope arrived safely and was sitting undisturbed on the shore.
Initially, the plan was to operate the Phenom XL G2 SEM within a cave, using a battery-powered generator to run the instrument, where it would be safe from the elements and the tens of thousands of shearwaters and other birds nesting on the island. Sure enough, the SEM wasn’t as sheltered as expected from the birds but, as it turned out, Miltenburg was able to house the microscope in one of the few buildings on the island occupied by nature guards and maritime police.
An invaluable scanning electron microscope for on-island analyses
Once on the island, the portable scanning electron microscope quickly attracted the interest of scientists. “Everyone asked me how it worked and what it could do for them,” Miltenburg says. “Basically, I was doing demos all the time and training the researchers so they could use the SEM themselves.”
Miltenburg ran demos so researchers could use the Phenom XL G2 SEM on their own.
The Phenom XL G2 SEM proved invaluable for a range of microbiology, geology, and astrobiology experiments conducted on the island. For example, one group of researchers studied bacteria that grow in caves to inform future experiments that will investigate if and what bacteria live or lives on Mars.
Yet another team examined different layers of rock to uncover the age of the Selvagens Islands, how the islands formed, and the geological events that led to their formation. “By looking at the rocks using the Phenom XL G2, geologists could determine whether there were fossils and the type of fossil,” Miltenburg says. “They could also date the rock by telling how many millions of years old the fossil is.”
In the first-ever field science expedition using a portable scanning electron microscope (SEM), an international team of scientists brought the Phenom XL G2 Desktop SEM to analyze samples they collected while on the remote Selvagens Islands.
No matter what their focus area, having a portable SEM on-site enabled the scientists to immediately analyze their samples, examine images to determine the morphology, and then using the SEM’s energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) capabilities to identify their chemical composition. “If you link them together, you have so much information in a matter of minutes,” says Miltenburg. “That’s really the power of an SEM.”
A versatile, portable SEM for the most inhospitable environments
In the end, both Miltenburg and the scientists he accompanied discovered just how portable SEMs have become. “In the past, SEMs weren’t flexible machines and you needed super-stable environments in order to run them,” says Miltenburg. “Now we’re at a point where you can bring an SEM to the most inhospitable island. The researchers saw that and said, ‘If the SEM survives this, I’m definitely going to buy one for my lab.’”
The Phenom XL G2 SEM operated smoothly throughout the expedition and continues to operate without a glitch. Given its success, Miltenburg believes it’s quite possible that a Phenom Desktop SEM could one day accompany scientists on a Mars mission.
“If you travel to Mars, it becomes 100,000 times more important that you bring the right stuff and that, in your limited time there, you have the best possible equipment to conduct critical research,” Miltenburg says. “An SEM may be on the list because there’s so much information you can get from it. A picture tells a thousand words, and I really think that’s true for the images acquired with an SEM.”
The researchers on the expedition would like to acknowledge the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests and the Selvagens Islands Nature Reserve for making this expedition possible.
Stay tuned for future blog posts about the Selvagens Islands expedition and how the Phenom XL G2 Desktop SEM assisted scientists with their groundbreaking microbiology, geology, and astrobiology discoveries while on the island.
To learn more, please visit our Phenom XL G2 Desktop SEM webpage.
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Rogier Miltenburg is an applications and product specialist at Thermo Fisher Scientific.
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