The X-Ray Laboratory was established by Steve Guggenheim and has a Bruker Apex single-crystal diffractometer (first picture) with both high-temperature (to 1200 EC) furnace, high-pressure diamond anvil, and low temperature attachments. This instrumentation allows for the atomic structure determination of materials.

The laboratory also houses a Siemens D-5000 automated powder diffractometer (second picture) with a high-temperature furnace capable of operation in either an oxidizing or reducing environment to 1500 EC. Recently an in-house, low-temperature, high-pressure environmental chamber for the study of organic-clay systems on the surface and near-surface of Mars was built.

Among other uses, the powder diffractometer is capable of phase identification, and can be used also to track phase transformations with respect to temperature or other conditions. In addition, the laboratory has Debye-Scherrer powder cameras and Gandolfi cameras, which are used to identify very small amounts of material. A scanner is available to process these film data. Buerger precession cameras are available for preliminary single-crystal work and this instrument is especially useful to obtain data on exsolution and twinning textures.