Technology inspired by NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvouz (NEAR) mission will soon be helping detectives solve gun crimes and murder cases far faster. A simple handheld device that instantly confirms whether a suspect has recently fired a gun means lab delays will not allow suspects time to get away.

The idea for the device was hatched under a new collaboration between NASA and the US National Institute of Justice. The plan is to adapt taxpayer-funded space research to fight terrestrial crime.

Jacob Trombka, a member of the NEAR mission team and a physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, set the ball rolling. He believes X-ray fluorescence (XRF) could be a key crime-fighting technology. X-ray fluorescence spectrometry can identify the chemical elements in a substance by measuring the wavelengths it emits when exposed to X-rays. NEAR's sensors simply recorded cosmic X-rays bouncing off the asteroid and beamed the details of the emissions back to Earth.

Read the details in NewScientist.com.

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