Leo ran his finger over the card. “So before computers… people did this by hand?”
Leo looked at his Martian mineral, now named. He thought of the cold, dry regolith of Jezero Crater, and the salt crystals forming in ancient, frozen water. And somewhere, in a digital vault in Pennsylvania, a JCPDS card—no, a record—held the exact angles of its atomic planes, waiting for someone like him to ask the right question.
He closed the laptop. The diffractometer hummed, ready for the next mystery.
Leo gasped. “That’s a Martian mineral! A sulfate hydrate formed in freezing brine.”
“A mistake,” she said softly. “From 1962. Someone indexed quartz wrong. They swapped two peaks. It was in the database for ten years before someone caught it.”