Evidence of Sulfate‐Rich Fluid Alteration in Jezero Crater Floor, Mars

Creators: Siljeström, Sandra; Czaja, Andrew D.; Corpolongo, Andrea; Berger, Eve L.; Li, An Y.; Cardarelli, Emily; Abbey, William; Asher, Sanford A.; Beegle, Luther W.; Benison, Kathleen C.; Bhartia, Rohit; Bleefeld, Benjamin L.; Burton, Aaron S.; Bykov, Sergei V.; Clark, Benton; DeFlores, Lauren; Ehlmann, Bethany L.¹; Fornaro, Teresa; Fox, Allie; Gómez, Felipe; Hand, Kevin; Haney, Nikole C.; Hickman‐Lewis, Keyron; Hug, William F.; Imbeah, Samara; Jakubek, Ryan S.; Kah, Linda C.; Kivrak, Lydia; Lee, Carina; Liu, Yang; Martínez‐Frías, Jesús; McCubbin, Francis M.; Minitti, Michelle; Moore, Kelsey; Morris, Richard V.; Núñez, Jorge I.; Osterhout, Jeffrey T.; Phua, Yu Yu; Randazzo, Nicolas; Razzell Hollis, Joseph; Rodriguez, Carolina; Roppel, Ryan; Scheller, Eva L.; Sephton, Mark; Sharma, Shiv K.; Sharma, Sunanda; Steadman, Kim; Steele, Andrew; Tice, Michael; Uckert, Kyle; VanBommel, Scott; Williams, Amy J.; Williford, Kenneth H.; Winchell, Katherine; Wu, Megan Kennedy; Yanchilina, Anastasia; Zorzano, Maria‐Paz

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Sulfur plays a major role in martian geochemistry and sulfate minerals are important repositories of water. However, their hydration states on Mars are poorly constrained. Therefore, understanding the hydration and distribution of sulfate minerals on Mars is important for understanding its geologic, hydrologic, and atmospheric evolution as well as its habitability potential. NASA's Perseverance rover is currently exploring the Noachian-age Jezero crater, which hosts a fan-delta system associated with a paleolake. The crater floor includes two igneous units (the Séítah and Máaz formations), both of which contain evidence of later alteration by fluids including sulfate minerals. Results from the rover instruments Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemistry and Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry reveal the presence of a mix of crystalline and amorphous hydrated Mg-sulfate minerals (both MgSO₄·[3–5]H₂O and possible MgSO₄·H₂O), and anhydrous Ca-sulfate minerals. The sulfate phases within each outcrop may have formed from single or multiple episodes of water activity, although several depositional events seem likely for the different units in the crater floor. Textural and chemical evidence suggest that the sulfate minerals most likely precipitated from a low temperature sulfate-rich fluid of moderate pH. The identification of approximately four waters puts a lower constraint on the hydration state of sulfate minerals in the shallow subsurface, which has implications for the martian hydrological budget. These sulfate minerals are key samples for future Mars sample return.

Copyright and License

© 2024 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the Mars 2020 Perseverance Science and Engineering teams for their work on the mission that has enabled the analysis of the crater floor targets. We also thank two anonymous reviewers who provided substantive feedback on a previous version of this paper. The work described in this paper was partially carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. S.S. acknowledges funding from the Swedish National Space Agency (contracts 2021-00092 and 137/19). A.D.C. and A.C. were supported by the Mars 2020 Returned Sample Science Participating Scientist Program (NASA award number 80NSSC20K0237), and A.C was additionally supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (award number 2035701). AYL was supported by subcontract number 1655697 from JPL (from NASA as part of the Mars 2020 Phase E funding). BLE and YP were supported by NASA Mars 2020 Co-Investigator funds to support BLE on SHERLOC. KCB was supported by the Mars 2020 Returned Sample Science Participating Scientist Program (NASA award number 80NSSC20K0235). ASB was supported by the Mars 2020 Mission. TF was supported by the ASI/INAF agreement 2023-3-HH.0. NCH was supported by the JETS II contract with Johnson Space Center, NASA. KHL was supported by the UK Space Agency Aurora Research Fellowship (ST/V00560X/1). RSJ acknowledges funding from an Advanced Curation project run by the NASA Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office, Johnson Space Center. RVM was supported by the ISFM Mission Enabling Work Package at the Johnson Space Center. MM was supported by a contract with NASA/JPL (1685477). MAS was supported by UK Space Agency Grants ST/V002732/1 and ST/V006134/1. SKS acknowledges Mars 2020 SuperCam Co-PI support and contract with NASA/JPL (1654163). SVB was supported by the Mars 2020 Participating Science Program, Grant 80NSSC21K0328. AJW was supported by the NASA Mars 2020 Participating Scientist Program, Grant 80NSSC21K0332. AY was supported by a contract with NASA/JPL (1651660). MPZ was supported by Grant PID2019-104205GB-C21 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

Data Availability

The data used in this publication include rock target close up images (WATSON, Figures 1-6, 1014 NASA PDS https://doi.org/10.17189/1522643, Beegle et al., 2021) X-ray fluorescence data 1015 (PIXL, Figures 2-6; Table 1, Figure S1 in Supporting Information S1 and Table S2, Tables S3 and S4 in Supporting Information S1, NASA PDS 1016 https://doi.org/10.17189/1522645, Allwood & Hurowitz, 2021), Raman and fluorescence data 1017 (SHERLOC, Figures 2-8, Tables 2–3, and Table S1 in Supporting Information S1 and Table S5, NASA 1018 PDS https://doi.org/10.17189/1522643, Beegle et al., 2021), and atmospheric data (MEDA, 1019 NASA PDS https://doi.org/10.17189/1522849, Rodriguez-Manfredi et al., 2021). 1020 Software packages used in this publication for SHERLOC data include Loupe (version v.5.1.5, 1021 Uckert, 2022, Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7062998) and peak fitting program Fityk 1022 (version v.1.3.1; Wojdyr, 2010, https://fityk.nieto.pl/). 48 1023 PIQUANT (Version v3.2.11, Elam & Heirwegh, 2022, Zenodo: 1024 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6959125.), PIXLISE Core (Version v.2.0, Nemere et al., 2022a, 1025 Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6959096) and PIXLISE UI (Version v.2.0, Nemere et al., 2022b, 1026 Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6959109) were used to treat PIXL data.

Supporting information S1

Table S2

Table S5

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest relevant to this study.

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