Characterizing Hydrated Sulfates and Altered Phases in Jezero Crater Fan and Floor Geologic Units With SHERLOC on Mars 2020

Creators: Phua, Yu Yu¹; Ehlmann, Bethany L.¹; Siljeström, Sandra²; Czaja, Andrew D.³; Beck, Pierre⁴; Connell, Stephanie⁵; Wiens, Roger C.⁵; Jakubek, Ryan S.⁶; Williams, Rebecca M. E.⁷; Zorzano, Maria‐Paz⁸; Minitti, Michelle E.⁹; Pascuzzo, Alyssa C.¹⁰; Hand, Kevin P.¹¹; Bhartia, Rohit¹²; Kah, Linda C.¹³; Mandon, Lucia¹; Razzell Hollis, Joseph¹⁴; Scheller, Eva L.¹⁵; Sharma, Sunanda¹¹; Steele, Andrew¹⁶; Uckert, Kyle¹¹; Williford, Kenneth H.¹⁷; Yanchilina, Anastasia G.¹

1. California Institute of Technology
2. RISE Research Institutes of Sweden
3. University of Cincinnati
4. Grenoble Alpes University
5. Purdue University West Lafayette
6. Johnson Space Center
7. Planetary Science Institute
8. Centro de Astrobiología
9. Framework, Silver Spring, MD, USA
10. Malin Space Science Systems (United States)
11. Jet Propulsion Lab
12. Photon Systems (United States)
13. University of Tennessee at Knoxville
14. Natural History Museum
15. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
16. Carnegie Institution for Science
17. Blue Marble Space Institute of Science

Abstract

The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has explored fluvio-lacustrine sedimentary rocks within Jezero crater. Prior work showed that igneous crater floor Séítah and Máaz formations have mafic mineralogy with alteration phases that indicate multiple episodes of aqueous alteration. In this work, we extend the analyses of hydration to targets in the Jezero western fan delta, using data from the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) Raman spectrometer. Spectral features, for example, sulfate and hydration peak positions and shapes, vary within, and across the crater floor and western fan. The proportion of targets with hydration associated with sulfates was approximately equal in the crater floor and the western fan. All hydrated targets in the crater floor and upper fan showed bimodal hydration peaks at ∼3,200 and ∼3,400 cm⁻¹. The sulfate symmetric stretch at ∼1,000 cm⁻¹ coupled with a hydration peak at ∼3,400 cm⁻¹ indicate that MgSO₄·nH₂O (2 < n ≤ 5) is a likely hydration carrier phase in all units, perhaps paired with low-hydration (n ≤ 1) amorphous Mg-sulfates, indicated by the ∼3,200 cm⁻¹ peak. Low-hydration MgSO₄·nH₂O (n = 1–2) are more prevalent in the fan, and hydrated targets in the fan front only had one peak at ∼3,400 cm⁻¹. While anhydrite co-occurs with hydrated Mg-sulfates in the crater floor and fan front, hydrated Ca-sulfates are observed instead at the top of the upper fan. Collectively, the data imply aqueous deposition of sediments with formation of salts from high ionic strength fluids and subsequent aridity to preserve the observed hydration states.

Copyright and License

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 thank the SHERLOC and Mars 2020 science and engineering teams for the data that enabled this study. This research was supported by funds to the SHERLOC instrument team and the NASA Mars 2020 mission. Y.P. and B.L.E. were supported by a Mars-2020 SHERLOC Co-Investigator grant to B.L.E. S.Si. acknowledges funding from the Swedish National Space Agency (contract 2021-00092 and 137/19). A.D.C. was supported by the Mars 2020 Returned Sample Science Participating Scientist Program (NASA award number 80NSSC20K0237). Support for R.C.W. and S.C. was provided by a SHERLOC Co-Investigator grant to R.C.W. and by NASA contract NNH13ZDA018O. Funding for R.S.J. was provided as an Advanced Curation project run by the NASA Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office, Johnson Space Center under the Jacobs, JETSII contract. MPZ was supported by Grant PID2022-140180OB-C21 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE. Research efforts carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology by K.H., S.Sh., K.U. were funded under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). L.M. was supported by a Texaco Postdoctoral prize fellowship awarded by the division of Geological and Planetary Sciences of Caltech.

Data Availability

All SHERLOC mission data described in this manuscript are accessible through the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) archive (Beegle & Bhartia, 2021). Data used here were sourced from the “Raw Spectroscopy” data collection. Specifically, data files with the ERA, ERB, ESP, and EPA product IDs were used as source files. The ACI and WATSON images were sourced from the PDS archive ACI image data and WATSON image data collections, respectively. EDR and ECM products were used. The CDR LIBS and reflectance spectra from SuperCam are available on the PDS (Maurice & Wiens, 2021). Loupe software (Uckert, 2022) was used to export SHERLOC data, which was subsequently processed using Python and related open-source Python libraries. Processed data used in constructing figures including peak fitting results of SHERLOC Raman spectra, SuperCam LIBS H peak area, and SuperCam IRS 1900 nm band depth, as well as spectral data of anhydrite and kieserite measured in this work are available at the CaltechDATA site (Phua et al., 2024).

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