Other
Scientific paper
Mar 2003
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003psrd.repte..70m&link_type=abstract
Planetary Science Research Discoveries
Other
Mars, Hematite, Meridiani, Geology, Mineralogy, Tes, Thermal Emission Spectra
Scientific paper
In our continuing coverage of the exploration of Mars and NASA's strategy of "follow the water," PSRD highlights recent research of the hematite deposit in Terra Meridiani. The iron oxide mineral called hematite forms on Earth in several ways, most involving water. For this reason, the announcement in 2000 of the discovery of crystalline gray hematite near the Martian equator was, in a word, a watershed for planetary geologists and astrobiologists interested in unraveling the history of water and climate on Mars. Detection of the hematite in Terra Meridiani is one of the key discoveries of the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) mission. Using TES spectral data in combination with image and topographic data, Brian Hynek, Raymond Arvidson, and Roger Phillips (Earth and Planetary Sciences and McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis) recently made detailed regional analyses of Terra Meridiani to better understand the origin and significance of the hematite in the Martian environment. Using Earth as a guide to hematite formation, researchers think the hematite could have formed on Mars by thermal oxidation of iron-rich volcanic eruptive products during eruption or it could have formed by chemical precipitation when iron-rich water circulated through the preexisting layers of volcanic material (ash). Hynek and his coauthors as well as other researchers studying data from Terra Meridiani prefer the chemical precipitation hypothesis because it is most consistent with their observations of the geology of the region.
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