Classification of soils at Gale along the traverse: A ChemCam perspective
Résumé
Introduction: Since its landing in 2012, the Curiosity rover has traversed more than 25 km along several geological units. Among the thousands of targets analyzed, 354 correspond to soils. Soils correspond to loose, non-consolidated material, which is the result of the physical and chemical alteration of rocks by several processes [1-3]. These soils are of great interest as they can be used to estimate the global chemical composition of the basaltic crust, but also to assess the past environmental conditions of the planet through their secondary phases. Curiosity has shown that there was up to 3 wt % H2O in fine-grained soils [4,5], but that the hydrated phases were not in the crystalline material but rather in the amorphous component [6]. It was also shown that the fine-grained soils were more hydrated than the coarser ones [1;7-9]. Here, we use the term "soil" in a sense discussed in [3]. Objectives: This study has the first objective to list and classify all data points that have sampled a soil target along the traverse by the ChemCam instrument. Once the classification is completed, differences in composition between the different grain fractions can be investigated. Methodology: This study uses data from the ChemCam instrument [10-11], which reports the chemical compositions of remote targets [12]. Here, we focus on soil targets only. The distinction between a soil and a rock target is first done visually from the context images (MastCam and NavCam) and the ChemCam/RMI ones. RMIs have been specifically used in order to locate each data point from ChemCam analyses. In some cases, the first point of a rock sample can have missed the target, and a soil has been sampled instead.
Domaines
PlanétologieOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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