Inaugural lecture as adjunct associate professor Kjartan Kinch

Inaugural lecture as adjunct associate professor Kjartan Kinch

Dr. Kjartan Kinch worked for ~20 years on camera teams for NASA’s Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. He worked on instrument development, calibration, and surface science operations, as well as on scientific interpretation.

In 2022 he left the Niels Bohr Institute for a position as Senior Scientist at FOSS Analytical where he works on calibration and instrument development in Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy and Near-Infrared Transmission Spectroscopy. In June 2023 he was appointed adjunct associate professor at the NBI.

Associate professor Kjartan KinchIn this inaugural lecture he will relate stories from instrument development for NASA missions and for industry, discuss similarities and differences, and discuss his experience changing career path. The talk will be aimed also at students and will include suggestions for Master projects in collaboration with FOSS.

NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars on February 18th, 2021

Since then, the rover has been exploring its landing site at Jezero Crater, sampling and studying a number of different past environments at the site from lava flows to lake and stream deposits.

  • Kjartan Kinch had a leading role in design and development of the radiometric calibration targets for the Mastcam-Z camera on the rover.
  • The target was built at the Niels Bohr Institute and is now on Mars where it has performed well for 3+ years.

He will describe the design and purpose of the calibration target, it’s implementation in the data processing chain, as well as daily operation of the rover and camera and some scientific results.

FOSS Analytical is the leading global provider of analytics for the food and agricultural industries. In November 2023 FOSS released MicralTM, a solution for fast and reliable elemental analysis of forage (hay, silage, etc. for animal feed). Micral is based on Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS).

MicralTM is the first application of LIBS in the agricultural sector although the technique has been in use in academia for many years, notably also on NASA Mars rovers, and is also commercially successful in fields such as e.g. process control, mining and scrap metal classification.

Kjartan Kinch will discuss the LIBS technique, the development of Micral TM, and the potential impact of the technique in agriculture and other fields in the future.