From the beginning this little Trinitite Teardrop was different than anything else I've seen.
Melted within the Trinity Fireball, gathering mass by conglomeration with countless other particles while molten,the protoglob was spinning at a high rate of speed, in the process of breaking up into smaller spheres, it cooled to a solid halfway through, into the more stable "dumbbell" shape.
Breaking into two twin "teardrops", each falling back through the now cooling mushroom cloud, gathering hitchhiker particles on the surface along the way.
Landing not far from Ground Zero, just a hundred yards, our particular teardrop became part of the myriad other sand particles littering the desert floor. At some point, very recently, an obliging desert ant excavated our teardrop along with countless others to create his desert nest and mound.

Just a week ago Jim H. collected a small sample of the ant's mound and sent it to the Home Lab, where I went through the sand, grain at a time,to find the teardrop, finally ending it's 65 year long odyssy to it's final destiny under my microscope

Click for picture:
http://www.qsl.net/k/k0ff/Trinitite%20Ant%20Hill%20Sand%20Analysis/Plutonium%20Teardrop/Plutonium%20Teapdrop.jpg

Bill Kolb suggested that it might be more radioactive than normal Trinitite, so I checked to see if the tiny 1mm X 5mm specimen would tickle a pancake probe. Boy did it ever!

Next it got a trip through the MCA Gamma Spectrum Analyzer for a standard 10 minute count.
Thinking there might be just enough radiation present to give at least a weak gamma signature, when the results were in, there was a nice surprise. This tiny fleck was more radioactive than a whole test tube of normal Trinitite and not only that it shows almost all Am-241.

Pu-239 was used in the Trinity Gadget of course and through neutron bombardment some of it was turned into Pu-241, which Beta Decays to Am-241 at a 14.4 Year half life.

The chart of Gamma Ray Photons for Am-241:

Photon Emission Products: Am-241 
Fraction Energy(MeV)
0.001060 0.033205
0.001793 0.069231
0.024000 0.026345
0.359000 0.059537
0.427000 0.013900

For each radioactive disintegration of any isotope, a certain "probability" of a 
particular type of radiation occurs. Activity levels of a radioactive element is given
in Bq (DPS) or Curies. 1 microCurie of anything produces 2.22 million DPM (disintegration's per
minute). According to our chart (C. Hacker) for each disintegration, 42.7% of the time there will be a 13.9 keV photon released, 35.9% of the time there will be a 59.5 keV photon released and 2.4% of the time there will be a 26.3 keV photon released. A photon is simply another name for a Gamma Ray.

With all that in mind view the MCA readout of the Teardrop, now renamed the Plutonium Teardrop:

http://www.qsl.net/k/k0ff/Trinitite%20Ant%20Hill%20Sand%20Analysis/Plutonium%20Teardrop/Plutonium_Teardrop_MCA_14_26_60keV_Peaks.jpg

The correlation of the ratio of 14/26/60 keV is readily apparent.

For some reason there was originally quite a bit of concentrated Plutonium in one of the constituents that wound up being our little specimen. Notice the globules attached to the surface and the inclusions inside the body.

Normal Trinitite contains a small amount of Am-241 plus a whole cacophony of other
isotopes, rendering a rather complex gamma scan:

http://www.qsl.net/k/k0ff/Trinitite%20Ant%20Hill%20Sand%20Analysis/Plutonium%20Teardrop/Trinityglassactivity1.jpg


Geo