URAMAN: shedding light on "life's building blocks"

What is URAMAN?

URAMAN is an example of a Raman spectrometer. It is an instrument that is capable of analyzing, non-invasively, the chemical, molecular or crystalline structure of a material. It uses a phenomenon in which light and the medium interact, called the "Raman effect" The principle is as follows: when a monochromatic light source comes into contact with a gas, a liquid or a solid, it can be scattered and it then carries a vibrational signature of the elements on which it was incident. These slight color variations form a spectrum, which allow the molecules to be identified.

 What are the applications of such an instrument?

RAMAN spectrometry is most often non-destructive - that is to say, it preserves the object being studied as it is. It makes it possible to study the composition of samples which it is preferable not to touch, for example, rare, fragile or in situ objects.

 In which types of project(s) is it used?

 Purchased in 2014, thanks to funding from the LabEx LIO, the URAMAN instrument is located at the Lyon Geology Laboratory, where it is used on several projects.

 A collaborative project with NASA

In particular, it is being used in the preparation of a NASA space mission. The equipment is currently being used to help calibrate the first Raman spectrometer to be sent into space. A team of researchers from the Lyon Geology Laboratory has joined the SuperCam scientific team. SuperCam is an instrument that will be part of the equipment on the successor to Curiosity,the Mars 2020 mission's rover. The goal of this geological robot will be to sample rocks (and perhaps send them back to Earth) and track down clues of past or present life on the red planet.

 On the remains of the origins of life

One of the URAMAN's main strengths is its ability to enable the study of prebiotic conditions, because it is able to detect what is called "the elementary building blocks of life", complex organic compounds capable of existing when the very first monocellular organisms made their first appearance. A study is currently being conducted on samples from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. These rocks, which have never been in contact with organic matter, have been found to contain real small reactors containing carbon compounds. The picture of their chemical composition obtained from URAMAN opens a window on the conditions favorable to their production and, therefore perhaps, to the appearance of life on Earth.

For the record, the URAMAN instrument takes its name from a typo! Originally, the vowel "u" placed before the term "Raman" was actually the symbol "μ" which designates micro, an order of magnitude, in reference to the instrument's very high resolving power.