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Originally Posted by fearn
The obvious problem is that the terrestrial iron isn't pure iron, nor is the carbon to make the steel pure carbon. There's going to be a mix of other trace elements that will have to be factored in.
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Fearn, There are a number of Meteorites Labs that receive “large” numbers of unknown samples sent to them. Anything from mining slag to your common variety of earth rocks. The whole point of fingerprinting with trace elements is because the trace elements that are found in cosmic source materials are unique enough for positive identification. You can check against the database and identify what you have. You will know if it is an earth rock… or if it is Lunar (Lunars are a little different than earth rocks)… or Martian, which was a little more work (it was the trapped gassed that ID’ed these). It would be highly improbable that you would get at trace element (ratio/concentration) match by accident. If you have worked with these curves (not much unlike FT-IR), then you know what I mean,
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Originally Posted by fearn
The unobvious problem is that keris blades are occasionally cleaned with an arsenic (As) solution, so the researcher has to factor in the accumulation (if any) from cleaning. Since it's not pure arsenic in the Indonesian cleaning solutions, this would take some experimentation.
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Surface contamination is an issue on any sample to be tested. This is the reason the surface is removed (polished), to reveal that actual material that you want to test.