November 2024
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4 Reads
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November 2024
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4 Reads
November 2024
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10 Reads
November 2024
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19 Reads
Planetary and Space Science
July 2023
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681 Reads
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41 Citations
The Máaz formation consists of the first lithologies in Jezero crater analyzed by the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover. This formation, investigated from Sols (Martian days) 1 to 201 and from Sols 343 to 382, overlies the Séítah formation (previously described as an olivine‐rich cumulate) and was initially suggested to represent an igneous crater floor unit based on orbital analyses. Using SuperCam data, we conducted a detailed textural, chemical, and mineralogical analyses of the Máaz formation and the Content member of the Séítah formation. We conclude that the Máaz formation and the Content member are igneous and consist of different lava flows and/or possibly pyroclastic flows with complex textures, including vesicular and non‐vesicular rocks with different grain sizes. The Máaz formation rocks exhibit some of the lowest Mg# (=molar 100 × MgO/MgO + FeO) of all Martian igneous rocks analyzed so far (including meteorites and surface rocks) and show similar basaltic to basaltic‐andesitic compositions. Their mineralogy is dominated by Fe‐rich augite to possibly ferrosilite and plagioclase, and minor phases such as Fe‐Ti oxides and Si‐rich phases. They show a broad diversity of both compositions and textures when compared to Martian meteorites and other surface rocks. The different Máaz and Content lava or pyroclastic flows all originate from the same parental magma and/or the same magmatic system, but are not petrogenetically linked to the Séítah formation. The study of returned Máaz samples in Earth‐based laboratories will help constrain the formation of these rocks, calibrate Martian crater counting, and overall, improve our understanding of magmatism on Mars.
July 2023
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546 Reads
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35 Citations
The Perseverance rover landed in the ancient lakebed of Jezero crater, Mars on February 2021. Here, we assess the mineralogy of the rocks, regolith, and dust measured during the first year of the mission on the crater floor, using the visible and near‐infrared spectrometer of SuperCam onboard the Perseverance rover. Most of the minerals detected from orbit are present in the bedrock, with olivine‐bearing rocks at the bottom of the stratigraphy and high‐Ca pyroxene‐bearing rocks at the top. This is distinct from the overall low‐Ca pyroxene‐bearing composition of the watershed of Jezero and points toward an igneous origin. Alteration mineral phases were detected in most of the rocks analyzed in low proportions, suggesting that aqueous alteration of the crater floor has been spatially widespread, but limited in intensity and/or time. The diverse aqueous mineralogy suggests that the aqueous alteration history of the crater floor consists of at least two stages, to form phyllosilicates and oxyhydroxides, and later sulfates. We interpret their formation in a lake or under deeper serpentinization conditions and in an evaporative environment, respectively. Spectral similarities of dust with some rock coatings suggest widespread past processes of dust induration under liquid water activity late in the history of Jezero. Analysis of the regolith revealed some local inputs from the surrounding rocks. Relevant to the Mars Sample Return mission, the spectral features exhibited by the rocks sampled on the crater floor are representative of the diversity of spectra measured on the geological units investigated by the rover.
June 2023
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155 Reads
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18 Citations
During the first year of NASA's Mars 2020 mission, Perseverance rover has investigated the dark crater floor unit of Jezero crater and four samples of this unit have been collected. The focus of this paper is to assess the potential of these samples to calibrate the crater‐based Martian chronology. We first review the previous estimation of crater‐based model age of this unit. Then, we investigate the impact crater density distribution across the floor unit. It reveals that the crater density is heterogeneous from areas which have been exposed to the bombardment during the last 3 Ga to areas very recently exposed to bombardment. It suggests a complex history of exposure to impact cratering. We also display evidence of several remnants of deposits on the top of the dark floor unit across Jezero below which the dark floor unit may have been buried. We propose the following scenario of burying/exhumation: the dark floor unit would have been initially buried below a unit that was a few tens of meters thick. This unit then gradually eroded away due to Aeolian processes from the northeast to the west, resulting in uneven exposure to impact bombardment over 3 Ga. A cratering model reproducing this scenario confirms the feasibility of this hypothesis. Due to the complexity of its exposure history, the Jezero dark crater floor unit will require additional detailed analysis to understand how the Mars 2020 mission samples of the crater floor can be used to inform the Martian cratering chronology.
June 2023
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910 Reads
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63 Citations
The first samples collected by the Mars 2020 mission represent units exposed on the Jezero Crater floor, from the potentially oldest Séítah formation outcrops to the potentially youngest rocks of the heavily cratered Máaz formation. Surface investigations reveal landscape‐to‐microscopic textural, mineralogical, and geochemical evidence for igneous lithologies, some possibly emplaced as lava flows. The samples contain major rock‐forming minerals such as pyroxene, olivine, and feldspar, accessory minerals including oxides and phosphates, and evidence for various degrees of aqueous activity in the form of water‐soluble salt, carbonate, sulfate, iron oxide, and iron silicate minerals. Following sample return, the compositions and ages of these variably altered igneous rocks are expected to reveal the geophysical and geochemical nature of the planet's interior at the time of emplacement, characterize martian magmatism, and place timing constraints on geologic processes, both in Jezero Crater and more widely on Mars. Petrographic observations and geochemical analyses, coupled with geochronology of secondary minerals, can also reveal the timing of aqueous activity as well as constrain the chemical and physical conditions of the environments in which these minerals precipitated, and the nature and composition of organic compounds preserved in association with these phases. Returned samples from these units will help constrain the crater chronology of Mars and the global evolution of the planet's interior, for understanding the processes that formed Jezero Crater floor units, and for constraining the style and duration of aqueous activity in Jezero Crater, past habitability, and cycling of organic elements in Jezero Crater.
June 2023
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299 Reads
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40 Citations
Perseverance explored two geological units on the floor of Jezero Crater over the first 420 Martian days of the Mars2020 mission. These units, the Máaz and Séítah formations, are interpreted to be igneous in origin, with traces of alteration. We report the detection of carbonate phases along the rover traverse based on laser‐induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), infrared reflectance spectroscopy (IRS), and time‐resolved Raman (TRR) spectroscopy by the SuperCam instrument. Carbonates are identified through direct detection of vibrational modes of CO3 functional groups (IRS and TRR), major oxides content, and ratios of C and O signal intensities (LIBS). In Séítah, the carbonates are consistent with magnesite‐siderite solid solutions (Mg# of 0.42–0.70) with low calcium contents (<5 wt.% CaO). They are detected together with olivine in IRS and TRR spectra. LIBS and IRS also indicate a spatial association of the carbonates with clays. Carbonates in Máaz are detected in fewer points, as: (a) siderite (Mg# as low as 0.03); (b) carbonate‐containing coatings, enriched in Mg (Mg# ∼0.82) and spatially associated with different salts. Overall, using conservative criteria, carbonate detections are rare in LIBS (∼30/2,000 points), IRS (∼15/2,000 points), and TRR (1/150 points) data. This is best explained by (a) a low carbonate content overall, (b) small carbonate grains mixed with other phases, (c) intrinsic complexity of in situ measurements. This is consistent with orbital observations of Jezero crater, and similar to compositions of carbonates previously reported in Martian meteorites. This suggests a limited carbonation of Jezero rocks by locally equilibrated fluids.
January 2023
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140 Reads
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14 Citations
The Perseverance rover, Mars 2020 mission, landed on the surface of the Jezero crater, on 18 February 2021. This Martian crater is suspected to have hosted a paleolake as evidenced by the numerous detections of aqueously altered phases and thus is a promising candidate for the search for past Martian life. The SuperCam instrument, a collaboration by a consortium of American and European laboratories, plays a leading role in this investigation, thanks to its highly versatile payload providing rapid, synergistic, fine‐scale mineralogy, chemistry, and color imaging. After its landing, the first measurements of Martian targets with the infrared spectrometer of SuperCam (IRS) showed new instrumental behaviors that had to be characterized and calibrated to derive unbiased science data. The IRS radiometric response has thus been calibrated using periodic observations of the Aluwhite SuperCam Calibration Target (SCCT). Parasitic effects were understood and mitigated, and the instrumental dark and noise are characterized and modeled. The reflectance calibrated data products, provided periodically on the NASA Planetary Data System, are corrected for the main instrumental features. This radiometric calibration allowed us to study the 2.5 μm absorption band, which has been discovered in the Séítah unit and is associated with phyllosilicates‐carbonates mixtures.
November 2022
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52 Reads
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2 Citations
Icarus
Digital Elevation Models (DEM) are widely used in planetary sciences, including for the specific case of Mars. DEMs allow us to extract topography parameters necessary in geomorphological studies. However, DEMs are not free from vertical errors, which yields uncertainties in calculations of parameters such as local slopes. In addition, slope maps computed from DEMs often display slope patterns which are not spatially correlated with the original images. We suspect such slope patterns to originate from DEM vertical errors. To investigate this question, we propose a fully numerical method to provide a quantitative analysis of slope errors based on DEM error propagation using synthetic models. We find that the addition of vertical errors following a normal distribution (random noise) leads to the occurrence of slope patterns comparable to those in observed data. Results are similar for the two models of spatially correlated errors. We also provide estimations of slope errors for four martian cameras: HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment), CaSSIS (Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System), HRSC (High Resolution Stereo Camera) and MOC (Martian Orbiter Camera). These estimations aim to be used as first order uncertainty constraints on local slopes for geomorphological studies.
... On the Jezero crater floor (Fig. 1), Perseverance investigated a suite of evolved, Fe-rich clinopyroxene-bearing basaltic to trachy-andesitic lavas, comprising the Máaz formation (fm) (35,36). The emplacement age(s) of Máaz fm lavas is not known, although it must be older than the impact crater age of its exposed surface-~2 Ga (37), which reflects a complex history of exhumation after burial by Jezero crater lake, fan/delta, and transient eolian sedimentary deposits (38). Similar pyroxene-rich compositions, crater-retention, and other morphological characteristics possibly relate the Máaz fm to a widespread Circum-Isidis mafic capping unit outside the crater (39). ...
June 2023
... Most Martian meteorites, which are the only samples of Mars we currently have on Earth, are igneous (no sedimentary ones have been found so far) and almost all of them formed relatively recent (<1 Gyr). The samples (0.5 kg) to be returned from Mars are expected to contain a more diverse mineralogy than Martian meteorites including sedimentary rocks and regolith samples with some dust component (Farley & Stack, 2023;Simon et al., 2023). ...
June 2023
... To avoid surface weathering and dust, the first 5 LIBS shots were excluded from the analysis. The visible and infrared (VISIR) spectrometer component (Fouchet et al., 2022) data used in this paper was calibrated and processed as described in Mandon et al. (2023) and Royer et al. (2023). ...
January 2023
... At a local scale, Fe-carbonates have been detected on the Columbia Hills by the Spirit rover (Morris et al., 2010) and at Gale crater where they are mixed with sulphates (Tutolo et al., 2024). The Perseverance rover has detected Mg-carbonates that are linked to the olivine-rich rocks of the Jezero crater (Clavé et al., 2023). These recent findings increase the potential storage of carbonates in Mars's crust, which is of strong importance for the understanding of past Mars climate (Tutolo et al., 2024). ...
Reference:
Mars as a Planet B?
June 2023
... The main difference between the carbon detections at the Phoenix and Gale crater landing sites was that the Gale crater soils lacked evidence of Ca-carbonate. (Cardarelli et al., 2023;Mandon et al., 2023;Morris et al., 2010;Thorpe et al., 2022). ...
July 2023
... For this purpose, the DEM processing pipeline established by the MarsSI platform [31,32] was employed to reduce the effects of artifact patterns and invalid pixel patches using adaptable thresholds for stereo matching and correlation by Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) DEMs sampled at 453 m/pixel [33]. The generated DEMs had a pixel resolution of 12 m/pixel and a vertical error of~2.2 m [34]. ...
November 2022
Icarus
... Over the past three years, Perseverance drove through three main units, including the crater floor. These represent igneous units (18,19,85); including the Máaz formation, which are basaltic lavas and pyroclasts, and the Séítah formation, which consists of olivine cumulates; Fig. 2), the western fan, and the margin unit (86), on the way to the crater rim. As shown in Fig. 4, we anticipate Hesperian to Noachian ages for the crater floor. ...
July 2023
... Nevertheless, we note that locally on Mars surface rocks with high amounts of olivine, such as olivine cumulates, have been documented at the surface of the planet. These rocks, however, are not representative of the crust where strong magnetic anomalies are seen (Liu et al., 2022). ...
August 2022
Science
... The Máaz formation had previously been mapped as the Crater floor fractured rough unit (Cf-fr), and the Séítah formation as the Crater floor fractured unit (Cf-f-1) by Stack et al. (11). Proximal and remote analyses carried out during the campaign suggest that all crater floor outcrops investigated are igneous in origin and dominantly ultramafic to mafic in composition (12)(13)(14). Surface investigations further reveal landscape-to-microscopic textural, mineralogical, and geochemical evidence that these crater floor units were likely emplaced as lava flows; furthermore, these rocks exhibit variable amounts of aqueous alteration and the formation of secondary carbonate and sulfate phases, among others (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20). The Máaz formation is a widespread extrusive unit that exhibits a smooth morphology lower in the stratigraphy, and a rougher, more massive, rubbly, and cratered morphology upsection (19,21). ...
August 2022
Science
... There is a proposed localized variation in meanders and bars formed in the depositional regime during the later stages of this delta's history [52]. For example, there is a wide range of various fluvial features on the top of the delta, including point bar strata in meandering channels, inverted channel-filling deposits by alluvial distributary channels, and incised valley deposits with very few post-fluvial dune stripes. ...
March 2022