A laser tool funded by the European Space Agency to measure carbon on Mars has been reappropriated to detect fake honey.

The counterfeit goods trade might more commonly be associated with handbags and watches, but it turns out that the world of honey trading is also a murky one, riddled with smuggling and fakery.

According to a Food Safety News investigation, more than a third of honey consumed in the US has been smuggled from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals. To make matters worse, some honey brokers create counterfeit honey using a small amount of real honey, bulked up with sugar, malt sweeteners, corn or rice syrup, jaggery (a type of unrefined sugar) and other additives—known as honey laundering. This honey is often mislabeled and sold on as legitimate, unadulterated honey in places such as Europe and the US.

Thanks to a new laser "isotope ratio-meter" developed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Harwell, this fake honey can be detected.

The device has small, highly accurate lasers designed to be sent to space to look for trace amounts of gas in very small samples. The laser has an adjustable optical frequency or "color" that can be beamed at a gas sample. The frequency can be adjusted until you reach a certain frequency that is specific to a particular gas, and the light is then partially blocked.

"Each molecule, and each of its isotopic forms, has a unique fingerprint spectrum. If, on the other hand, you know what you are looking for, you can simply set the laser to the appropriate frequency," explained Damien Weidmann, Laser Spectroscopy Team Leader at RAL Space.

The relative levels of different isotopes can reveal information about the history of the formation of the molecule. Weidmann is keen to use the system to examine the methane in the Martian atmosphere, looking at the ratios of carbon isotopes to identify its origin. A bacterial origin would indicate life had occurred on Mars.

The same tool can be used to scan the carbon dioxide released from burning a few milligrams of honey to see whether it is a cheap substitute or not. Weidmann explains: "You take a food sample -- a few milligrams of olive oil, chocolate, wheat or whatever -- and you burn. As the sample burns, it releases carbon dioxide you test with the laser instrument."

RAL Space has teamed up with UK company Protium MS to develop a small portable device that can be used to probe for counterfeit foods -- not just honey, but also olive oil and chocolate. This will provide a carbon isotope fingerprint that shows the product's provenance. "You will know, in the case of olive oil, if it genuinely comes from Sicily or if it is a counterfeited fake," adds Weidmann.

David Bell, director of Protium, explains that honey is a "classic example" because "it's an expensive product to buy, but you can create a counterfeit product that looks very similar using sugar instead of bees." Laser analysis of this sort can match the honey to the flowers of a specific geographic region.

Bell believes that, as lasers become smaller and lighter, this mechanism will be used more in the future to test food health and safety. "The tests can help identify the geographical origin of food products and identify counterfeits with high accuracy," Bell concludes.

This story originally appeared on Wired UK.