Los Alamos National Laboratory

A team from Los Alamos National Laboratory has received the Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award for their contributions on the thermoelectric generator that provides electrical power and heat to the Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover.
The award was presented by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to Craig Van Pelt, Alejandro Enriquez, Diane Spengler, John Matonic and David Armstrong Oct. 4, in Washington D.C. The Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award is typically given to recognize a group or team of employees who together accomplished significant achievements on behalf of DOE.
Powering a rover as sophisticated as Curiosity is made possible through the Plutonium-238 fueled Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, which was successful in part due to the Los Alamos National Laboratory employees who worked on this project.
The MMRTG keeps the rover’s battery charged night and day, giving Curiosity the potential of being the longest-operating, farthest-traveling, most-productive Mars surface mission in history.

Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory have devised a method to use cosmic rays to gather detailed information from inside the damaged cores of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, which were heavily damaged in March 2011 by a tsunami that followed a great earthquake.

In a paper in Physical Review Letters, researchers compared two methods for using cosmic-ray radiography to gather images of nuclear material within the core of a reactor similar to Fukushima Daiichi Reactor No. 1. The team found that Los Alamos’ scattering method for cosmic ray radiography was far superior to the traditional transmission method for capturing high-resolution image data of potentially damaged nuclear material.

“Within weeks of the disastrous 2011 tsunami, Los Alamos’ Muon Radiography Team began investigating use of Los Alamos’ muon scattering method to determine whether it could be used to image the location of nuclear materials within the damaged reactors,” said Konstantin Borozdin of Los Alamos’ Subatomic Physics Group and lead author of the paper.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have used neutron crystallography for the first time to determine the structure of a clinical drug in complex with its human target enzyme.

Seeing the detailed structure of the bonded components provides insights into developing more effective drugs with fewer side effects for patients.

The atomic details of drug binding have been largely unknown due to the lack of key information on specific hydrogen atom positions and hydrogen bonding between the drug and its target enzyme. In this research, scientists used the drug acetazolamide (AZM) — a sulfonamide drug that has been used for decades to treat a variety of diseases such as glaucoma, altitude sickness and epilepsy. But when the drug binds with the wrong form (called an isoform) of the target enzyme for the disease, it can produce unpleasant side effects in patients (so called “off-target” drug binding).

Enter neutron crystallography — the use of neutron scattering to paint a picture of these bonds.

By providing precise information on hydrogen bonding between target enzymes and the treatment drugs (carbon anhydrase II targeted by AZM in this study), the research enables improvements in targeted binding with fewer side effects.

Santana Garcia-Chang and Francisco “Kiko” Rael, formerly of Questa, have a new home: Los Alamos and they love it.

They also have the seeds of careers at Los Alamos National Laboratory — thanks to a helping hand from a scholarship fund started by lab employees and run by the LANL Foundation.

Garcia-Chang and Rael hang out with scientists and engineers. Rael enjoys playing pickup soccer at the community field.

They visit Mesa Public Library and the Fuller Lodge Art Center.

“Los Alamos feels like a small town that’s tight-knit and ideal for families, and still has cultural things to do,” Garcia-Chang says. “It’s our home.”

Their days are busy: caring for their toddler son, Javan, working at Los Alamos National Laboratory where she is an intern and he is a full-time contractor and studying for college classes. But their eyes are on the prize of careers in environmental/civil engineering and health physics for radiation protection.