CaltechAUTHORS
Published October 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Dark-Toned Halite-Enriched Veins Above the Marker Band Record a Drying Environment in Gale Crater

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Arizona State University
  • 2. ROR icon Space Science Institute
  • 3. ROR icon Georgia Institute of Technology
  • 4. ROR icon University of Tennessee at Knoxville
  • 5. ROR icon University of New Brunswick
  • 6. ROR icon Los Alamos National Laboratory
  • 7. ROR icon Purdue University West Lafayette
  • 8. ROR icon Planetary Science Institute
  • 9. ROR icon Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale
  • 10. ROR icon Imperial College London
  • 11. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 12. ROR icon Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
  • 13. ROR icon Joanneum Research
  • 14. ROR icon Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology
  • 15. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 16. ROR icon Centro de Astrobiología
  • 17. ROR icon Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique de Nantes

Abstract

The Martian surface preserves evidence of a global climate transition from wetter to drier conditions, but the nature of the fluids involved in this evolution remains poorly constrained. In Gale crater, the clay‐sulfate transition and presence of evaporite mineral assemblages can provide insights into the properties of these fluids and the timing of environmental change. While traversing through the Chenapau member of the sulfate‐bearing unit in Gale crater, the Curiosity rover encountered a set of dark‐toned veins enriched in Na and Cl, suggestive of halite. However, previous halite detections in Gale crater have been limited to occurrences along the edges of Ca‐sulfate veins or nodules, suggesting a unique origin for this set of veins. Here, we hypothesize that these veins formed through the infiltration of saline fluids along pre‐existing hydraulically induced fractures. These fluids permeated into the host rock beyond the primary fractures, precipitating halite and cementing the fractures. Using Mastcam and ChemCam spectra, we found that the veins displayed a downturn in the near‐infrared wavelengths, consistent with the presence of ferrous iron. Furthermore, textural analysis of the veins reveals host rock material preserved within the veins. ChemCam laser‐induced breakdown spectroscopy observations also support the presence of a minor Fe component in the veins and halite concentrated along the center of the fractures. Our results demonstrate that these veins represent a distinct class of diagenetic features in Curiosity's mission that record an important transition in near‐surface fluid chemistry consistent with a transition to a drier environment.

Copyright and License

© 2025 The Author(s). 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

Thank you to the Malin Space Science Systems and MSL operations teams that enabled the collection of these data sets, and to the Arizona State University students and staff that helped with Mastcam calibrations. This research was funded by the NASA MSL Project, via subcontract 11-0124 to Arizona State University from Malin Space Sciences, Inc. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant 2233001. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Part of the research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004).

Data Availability

The Mastcam images and multispectral data used in this manuscript are available on the Planetary Data System (PDS) Cartography and Imaging Sciences Node (Planetary Data System Cartography and Imaging Sciences Node, 2025). The ChemCam active and passive data used in this manuscript are available on the PDS Geosciences node (Planetary Data System Geosciences Node, 2025). Additional data, including the Mastcam ROI selections and ChemCam peak fitting scripts can be found in a Zenodo repository (Trussell, 2025).

Supplemental Material

Supporting Information S1 (PDF)

Files

JGR Planets - 2025 - Trussell - Dark‐Toned Halite‐Enriched Veins Above the Marker Band Record a Drying Environment in Gale.pdf

Files (10.9 MB)

Additional details

Related works

Is supplemented by
Supplemental Material: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1029%2F2025JE009244&file=2025JE009244-sup-0001-Supporting+Information+SI-S01.pdf (URL)
Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.15611155 (DOI)

Funding

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80NM0018D0004
Malin Space Science Systems (United States)
11-0124
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
2233001

Dates

Accepted
2025-10-06
Available
2025-10-16
Version of record online
Available
2025-10-16
Issue online

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)
Publication Status
Published