Question: What is the scientific name of the big machine that you look at the sand with?

Jessica Franklin answered on 8 Nov 2019:

There are two that I use most of the time. One is called a scanning electron microscope, which is a very powerful microscope that can identify the chemistry of the individual minerals in a rock. The other big machine is called a mass spectrometer, this machine counts the amounts of different elements in an individual sand grain!