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Published by: François Doucet, Ph.D.
CEO, ELEMISSION

As global demand for critical minerals intensifies and environmental scrutiny sharpens, the mining industry faces a dual challenge: deliver faster, cleaner results. From exploration to remediation, traditional approaches to geochemical and mineralogical analysis are no longer enough. The delays caused by off-site laboratories and the limitations of older imaging technologies like near infrared hyperspectral scanning and XRF core logging are slowing down critical decision-making at a time when speed and sustainability are non-negotiable.

At ELEMISSION, we’ve spent more than a decade tackling this challenge head-on. Our latest article in Canadian Mining Journal outlines how our ECORE technology — built on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) — is revolutionizing core scanning and ore body knowledge across the mining lifecycle.

A Technology Inspired by Space Missions — Now Reimagined for Earth

LIBS gained international attention with NASA’s ChemCam onboard the Mars Curiosity rover. That same principle — laser ablation followed by optical emission spectroscopy — is now central to ELEMISSION’s approach. But we’ve taken it far beyond its original limitations.

With ECORE, our full-scale and mobile scanning systems deliver:

Case Study: Foran Mining’s McIlvenna Bay Project

A powerful example of ECORE’s real-world impact is our partnership with Foran Mining Corp. at their McIlvenna Bay project in Saskatchewan — Canada’s first carbon-neutral mine under construction.

Over just 12 weeks, ECORE scanned 17,254 metres of drill core, converting high-resolution data into digital twins of the orebody. This unprecedented visualization enabled Foran’s team to:

As Johan Krebs, Foran’s Principal Geoscientist – Orebody Knowledge, put it:

“What ELEMISSION has done with their LIBS systems is bring the speed up to a place where that wasn’t imaginable just five years ago. It’s only a matter of time before the market latches on that there is something unique here.”

Accelerating the Clean Energy Transition — One Core at a Time

ECORE is more than a scanner — it’s a strategic enabler. From supporting metallurgical calibration to reducing tailings and improving permitting timelines, our technology is designed to:

We’ve shown that LIBS isn’t just a lab curiosity — it’s an industrial-grade tool that belongs on-site, on-rig, and in real-time decision-making.

Read the Full Article

🔗 Click here to read the full article in Canadian Mining Journal
Or visit: www.elemission.ca

Let’s Talk

Want to explore how ECORE can improve your core analysis and reduce your environmental footprint?

📧 Contact us at contact@elemission.ca
📍 Book a demo at demo@elemission.ca

The mining industry is transforming at an unprecedented pace, powered by technological advancements, regulatory shifts, and the growing need for efficiency. With rising economic pressures and sustainability demands, companies must embrace automation and data-driven solutions to remain competitive.

Traditional mineral analysis methods are slow, costly, and highly labour-intensive. As operations grow in complexity and cost pressures mount, outdated workflows create inefficiencies that hinder productivity and profitability. The ability to rapidly assess mineral composition is no longer a luxury—it is an operational necessity. Real-time solutions are now critical for optimizing resource management and ensuring long-term sustainability.

At ELEMISSION, we address these challenges by delivering advanced, AI-powered mineral characterization technologies – ECORE Gen3, ECORE Flex, ECORE Mobile, and COBRA – designed to redefine mineral analysis. By integrating high-speed identification systems, automated data processing, and AI-driven mechanization, mining professionals can:

Adapting with ELEMISSION’s Advanced Solutions

Laboratories face increasing pressure to process high sample volumes efficiently, yet manual methods introduce risks of isolated human error and slow down workflows. Bottlenecks in mineral characterization impact profitability and sustainability, making system integration essential for mining companies looking to scale operations effectively.

ELEMISSION provides state-of-the-art solutions that enhance productivity, improve precision, and modernize mining operations. Our LIBS technologies eliminate bottlenecks, accelerate analysis, and ensure real-time high-accuracy mineral identification.

By leveraging cutting-edge automation and AI-powered systems, mining companies can :

The ELEMISSION Technology Suite

To meet the growing demands of the mining industry, ELEMISSION has developed a suite of LIBS products that optimize mineral analysis, optimize workflows, and improve operational efficiency. Each technology is designed to address specific challenges, ensuring accuracy, speed, and adaptability in various mining environments.

By integrating these state-of-the-art technologies, mining companies can reduce downtime, improve mineral recovery, and streamline workflows. Enhanced precision minimizes waste while maximizing high-value material extraction, leading to lower operational costs and greater profitability.

The Future of Mining: Adapting to Industry Shifts

The mining sector is undergoing rapid transformation, shaped by shifting regulations, fluctuating costs, and growing sustainability expectations. Supply chain disruptions and operational inefficiencies add pressure on companies striving to maintain profitability and long-term resilience. To stay ahead, mining professionals must adopt technology-driven solutions that:

As mining corporations move toward a more automated, data-centric, and environmentally responsible future, integrating AI-powered mineral analysis is no longer an option- it is a necessity. ELEMISSION’s advanced suite of solutions plays a key role in helping companies adapt by providing:

For example, mining operations that have integrated ECORE  have reported typical 5 to 8% increase in mineral recovery efficiency, leading to direct cost savings and improved sustainability.

By integrating high-speed mineralogical analysis solutions and scalable automation, mining companies strengthen their resilience against trade fluctuations, ensuring efficiency, cost savings, and long-term competitiveness.

Take the Next Step Toward Smarter Mining

Whether you need LIBS solutions, real-time data insights, or high-speed mineralogical analysis solutions processing, our solutions are built to improve mineral identification, optimize resource utilization, and improve decision-making across all stages of mining operations.

Are you ready to optimize your mining processes? Our products are designed to improve mineral identification, maximize resource utilization, and enhance decision-making at every stage of mining operations. Let’s discuss how ELEMISSION can help your business achieve greater efficiency, sustainability, and profitability.

Credit : Acumen Media

The global demand for critical minerals is surging, driven by the worldwide transition towards a greener future. Traditional exploration workflows, involving post-drill core logging and external laboratory analyses, often result in slow and inconsistent data, delaying crucial decision-making in mineral exploration and production strategies. ELEMISSION’s groundbreaking ECORE technology is set to transform this landscape by delivering faster, more precise, and more accurate analysis directly on-site.

Deployed at Foran Mining’s McIlvenna Bay property, the ECORE Mobile laboratory houses an advanced ECORE scanner within a robust shipping container designed for rapid, on-site core sample analysis. This innovation not only streamlines operations but also significantly reduces the delays traditionally associated with sample transportation and external lab processing.

Unmatched Technological Advancements

The ECORE system, a fully automated, high-speed Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) commercial drill core scanner, offers comprehensive analysis capabilities. Unlike traditional methods such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF), LIBS can detect every element on the periodic table, including all critical minerals. Its scanning speed is independent of the commodity and its concentration, making ECORE exceptionally effective in analyzing a wide range of elements, particularly light elements that are challenging for other technologies.

Strategic Deployment and Operational Benefits

At the McIlvenna Bay site, known for its complex VHMS (volcanogenic massive sulphide) deposit, the ECORE Mobile lab’s deployment has provided rapid insights into the mineralogy of the area. By generating detailed mineralogical maps on-site, the ECORE system has been instrumental in optimizing production plans and future extraction strategies, thus enhancing the efficiency of critical mineral exploration. Notably, hyperspectral imaging using diffuse reflectance infrared spectroscopy (SWIR, VNIR, LWIR) is ineffective for low albedo VHMS rocks, giving ECORE another advantage over traditional drill core scanning technologies.

A Vision for the Future

The mobile lab’s ability to withstand harsh field conditions and provide real-time, high-quality data has proven to be transformative. With immediate analysis capabilities, the need for external lab reliance is drastically reduced, allowing for swifter strategic decisions during the exploration phase.

The successful implementation of the ECORE Mobile lab at McIlvenna Bay exemplifies the potential of LIBS technology to revolutionize the mining industry. The speed, accuracy, and versatility of the ECORE system make it an invaluable tool for mining companies striving to meet the escalating global demand for critical minerals efficiently and sustainably. Over a 12-week period, ECORE has successfully scanned 18,000 meters of drill core.


ELEMISSION is committed to continuing its innovation in geochemical analysis, pushing the boundaries of mining technology to better serve the industry and the environment.

For more information:
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Do you dream about combining infrared hyperspectral imaging and XRF into one instrument to get more useful information about your cores? The fusion of these two technologies might not be the solution to improve your data. You will still have incomplete mineralogical information since infrared hyperspectral imaging cannot supply you with information about several useful minerals (e.g. sulfides) as well as native metals. The combination with XRF will add some information about the core’s multi-elemental content, but nevertheless, the sensitive detection of many elements requires a long dwell time, thus limiting the acquisition to every 10 cm. And more importantly, you do not have access to multi-elemental microanalysis on the core’s surface (therefore losing spatial information since XRF core loggers are not hyperspectral imagers) to complement the selectivity of infrared hyperspectral imaging. Furthermore, XRF with a practical scanning dwell time is not sensitive to light elements (i.e. atomic numbers lower than 13).

ELEMISSION’s ECORE drill core scanner brings you the solution to your lack of information with a sensitivity that competes with LA-ICP-MS or SIMS. In fact, the laser-based technology allows a full microanalysis of the drill core, bringing you a complete set of information from the quantitative automated mineralogy to multi-elemental assays (keeping spatial information like texture and deportation), physical properties such as density, hardness, rock quality designation and more. This disruptive technology has been validated for microanalysis using micro-XRF and SEM-EDS (TIMA-X, MLA, QEMSCAN) for ultra-fast and accurate identification of rock’s mineral content. ELEMISSION realized the first 7.6-megapixel hyperspectral image made automatically (without human intervention, except pressing the start button) directly from a surface scanning raster on the drill core. As soon as the scanning data becomes available, ELEMISSION’s software automatically starts interpreting data, generating reports as well as compiling files containing info on quantitative automated mineralogy, multi-elemental assays, rock quality designation, density, hardness of the rocks, and more. These data files are specially designed to be fed to your favorite data mining software for the global interpretation of the orebody.

If you want to learn why ECORE technology is disrupting well-established drill core scanning and core logging technology, please take time to read our new peer-review paper here.

The ELEMISSION team is particularly excited as the Perseverance rover approaches the landing stage on Mars. The Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012, made LIBS technology known through the solar system with the ChemCam (“ Chemical Camera ”). NASA’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) re-embarked LIBS technology on the Perseverance rover with the new SuperCam. SuperCam combines the multi-element analysis strength of LIBS technology with the molecular selectivity of Raman and photometry. Since the Perseverance mission will focus on the search for past (or actual) life-form on Mars, the SuperCam will be a key sensor for the standoff detection of relevant targets. The sensor will help to answer the question of the presence of life on Mars by the combination of multi-element signatures and molecular signatures.

About ELEMISSION:

ELEMISSION has been commercializing LIBS technology since 2014 and stands out from competitors by increasing the representativeness of analyses due to the large sampling capacity of its LIBS instruments. In fact, ELEMISSION is the LIBS manufacturer with the fastest analysis speed on the market, with its 1000 measurements per second, ELEMISSION is 10 to 100 times faster than other instruments on the market. In 2016, ELEMISSION launched the first LIBS hyperspectral imager, MISSION: CORIOSITY (merging of Core and Curiosity keywords) and won in 2017 the innovation of the year at the very prestigious conference on scientific instrumentation Pittcon. Since the company creation in 2014, we are driven by our vision to become leaders in the manufacturing of highly precise and accurate multi-elemental analyzers using Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS).

A laser imager on Mars: the Perseverance rover lands today! Follow the NASA robot equipped with the SuperCam LIBS analyzer here.