Laboratory for Space Sciences @ Wash U Physics

We have submitted abstracts to the Meteoritical Society society. This year the meeting will be held in Hokkaido, Japan. “MetSoc” is my favorite week of the year!

Data visualization is cool and I’ve been thinking about better ways to visualize backscattered electron images of meteorite thin sections. Scanning electron microscopes can acquire these images with sixteen bits of intensity information (pixels have values between 0 and 65,535), but for display we’re pretty much stuck with eight bits (0-255). So we’re throwing away a lot of information and possibly missing some subtle variations of contrast by converting to 8-bit grayscale. One solution is to map the 16 bits of grayscale values to 24 bits of color values. This will give us more unique color values. But how should we do this mapping? That is the question!

Below is the same backscattered electron image for six different color maps: (from left to right): gray (256 unique 8-bit color values — of course!), inferno (904 unique 8-bit color values), magma (778), parula (963), viridis (688), plasma (686).

I think my favorite is the third from the left: magma. I prefer mapping black to black for the zero value, but maybe I am too stodgy. Unfortunately magma has fewer unique 16-bit -> 8-bit color values than inferno and parula. However inferno most easily allows one to distinguish iron sulfide from iron metal which is important and certainly difficult to do in the grayscale image. (Another idea is to use grayscale mapping but have a dynamic black point, white point, and gamma.)

Bonus: can you find the SIMS spot?

This is my favorite meteorite Acfer 094.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
clearvars

close all

% Color maps from:

% https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/51986-perceptually-uniform-colormaps



A=imread('~/Downloads/Acfer-TEMP/070_020.png');

pxx=size(A,1);

pxy=size(A,2);



pp1=gray(2^16);

pp2=inferno(2^16);

pp3=magma(2^16);

pp4=parula(2^16);

pp5=viridis(2^16);

pp6=plasma(2^16);



A1=uint8(reshape(255*pp1(A+1,:),pxx,pxy,3));

A2=uint8(reshape(255*pp2(A+1,:),pxx,pxy,3));

A3=uint8(reshape(255*pp3(A+1,:),pxx,pxy,3));

A4=uint8(reshape(255*pp4(A+1,:),pxx,pxy,3));

A5=uint8(reshape(255*pp5(A+1,:),pxx,pxy,3));

A6=uint8(reshape(255*pp6(A+1,:),pxx,pxy,3));



image([A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6])

axis image

axis off

imwrite([A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6],'colormap_16bit_test.png');



fprintf('Unique colors in gray: %d\n',size(unique(uint8(round(255*pp1)),'rows'),1))

fprintf('Unique colors in inferno: %d\n',size(unique(uint8(round(255*pp2)),'rows'),1))

fprintf('Unique colors in magma: %d\n',size(unique(uint8(round(255*pp3)),'rows'),1))

fprintf('Unique colors in parula: %d\n',size(unique(uint8(round(255*pp4)),'rows'),1))

fprintf('Unique colors in viridis: %d\n',size(unique(uint8(round(255*pp5)),'rows'),1))

fprintf('Unique colors in plasma: %d\n',size(unique(uint8(round(255*pp6)),'rows'),1))

Brendan Haas discusses his Ph.D. work in Wash U’s Ampersand.

Lionel is measuring cosmic symplectite (COS) in our NanoSIMS. This is very exciting for us as COS is one of the most interesting mineral assemblages ever discovered. It’s tiny and rare but holds clues about comets, the outer Solar System, and the transport of water in planetary systems.

This was a very cool paper on YORP and asteroid Gault. I was fortunate to be able to provide a perspective in this Newsweek article.

We have returned from the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference! It was a great conference, highlights include a screening of the Apollo 11 movie (it was spectacular), major announcements, meeting up with old friends, lots of fantastic science talks (it’s hard to pick a favorite but this is certainly a contender), and many discussions about future science projects. It’s good to be back in St. Louis though, and back to teaching!

Cool story in the Atlantic about “lost” iron meteorites.

People tend to picture irons when they hear “meteorites”. They are varied and fascinating and could provide interesting constraints on the formation of the Solar SYstem.

Live coverage

Today is one of the most exciting/stressful days of the year — LPSC abstract deadline day! Our group submitted a lot of great abstracts today — covering topics ranging from the Sun to the asteroid belt to distant supernovae.

Tomorrow is commonly known as the least productive day in planetary science.

Olga Pravdivtseva was awarded a NASA grant to use the iodine-xenon radiometric chronometer to investigate the formation and alteration of components in the CK and CV carbonaceous chondrites. Olga is one of the world’s experts in this technique which provides us with exquisite time resolution to understand processes in the early Solar System. With these measurements, it is possible to constrain the timing of events that happened four billion years ago to +/-100,00 years. This is equivalent to remembering the time at which something that happened a year ago to within 15 minutes!