Elevation Anomalies of the Volcanic Floor Unit and Their Relationships to the Multiple Lakes of Jezero Crater, Mars
Abstract
We reassessed several orbital topographic data sets for the Perseverance rover landing site at Jezero Crater, Mars to better understand its floor units. Tens-of-meters deep topographic anomalies occur in the volcanic floor of Jezero crater and are not a result of impact cratering. Eight km-scale steep escarpment-bounded depressions may be locations of paleotopographic highs that were embayed by the volcanic floor lava flows, forming inverted topography from either contemporaneous upward inflation of embaying lavas or later deep scour due to differential erosion over 107−9 years. Five multi km-scale shallow-sloped depressions linked by channel-like forms may record locations of buried paleolakes and channels that predate the volcanic floor units or a drained magma system. These results indicate Jezero experienced multiple closed-basin or dry phases, allowing erosion of the crater floor and creation of topography, which provides new geologic context for the samples gathered by Perseverance.
Copyright and License
© 2024. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications oradaptations are made
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Briony Horgan for helpful suggested improvements to this manuscript. This work was supported by the Mars 2020 mission and a NASA Grant to Mastcam-Z Co-I B.L.E.
Contributions
Conceptualization: A. M. Annex, B. L. Ehlmann
Data curation: A. M. Annex
Formal analysis: A. M. Annex
Funding acquisition: B. L. Ehlmann
Investigation: A. M. Annex
Methodology: A. M. Annex
Project administration: B. L. Ehlmann
Software: A. M. Annex
Supervision: B. L. Ehlmann
Visualization: A. M. Annex
Data Availability
All data and software written for this work are publicly available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international license at the CaltechDATA site (Annex & Ehlmann, 2024). CTX DTM and orthoimage of Jezero Crater and surrounding regions is publicly available from Mangold et al. (2021). HiRISE DTM and orthoimage mosaic of the western fan is publicly available from Fergason et al. (2020). HiRISE EDR, RDR, and DTM products were accessed from the PDS (McEwen, 2007a, 2007b, 2009). CTX EDR products were also accessed from the PDS (Michael C. Malin, 2007). Version 2.3.0 of the WhiteboxTools used to produce the mean elevation change map in Figure 3 is developed at https://github.com/jblindsay/whitebox-tools/ under a MIT software license (Lindsay et al., 2015). Version 3.30 of the QGIS software used to make Figures 1-3 and all supporting information figures is developed at https://github.com/qgis/QGIS under the GNU Public License (GPL) Version 2.
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- ISSN
- 1944-8007
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Caltech groups
- Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences