A laboratory effort to quantitatively address clay abundance on Mars

Details A laboratory effort to quantitatively address clay abundance on Mars A laboratory effort to quantitatively address clay abundance on Mars

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufm.p23b1710r&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #P23B-1710

Other

[3672] Mineralogy And Petrology / Planetary Mineralogy And Petrology, [3694] Mineralogy And Petrology / Instruments And Techniques, [5464] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Remote Sensing, [6225] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Mars

Scientific paper

Data obtained at visible and near-infrared wavelengths by OMEGA on MarsExpress and CRISM on MRO provide definitive evidence for the presence of phyllosilicates and other hydrated phases on Mars. A diverse range of both Fe/Mg-OH and Al-OH-bearing phyllosilicates were identified including the smectites, nontronite, saponite, and montmorillonite. In order to constrain the abundances of these phyllosilicates spectral analyses of mixtures are needed. We report on our effort to enable the quantitative evaluation of the abundance of hydrated-hydroxylated silicates when they are contained in mixtures. We include two component mixtures of hydrated/hydroxylated silicates with each other and with two analogs for other martian materials; pyroxene (enstatite) and palagonitic soil (an alteration product of basaltic glass). For the hydrated-hydroxylated silicates we include saponite and montmorillonite (Mg- and Al- rich smectites). We prepared three size separates of each end-member for study: 20-45, 63-90, and 125-150 μm. As an initial phase of our effort we used scanning electron microscopy imaging and x-ray diffraction to characterize the grain size distribution, and structural nature, respectively, of the pure end-member materials. Visible and near-infrared reflectance spectra of the 63-90 μm grain size of the end-member samples are shown in Figure 1. We discuss the results of our initial measurements of these samples.

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