Soil and Rock Physical Properties at the Mars Exploration Rovers Landing Sites

Details Soil and Rock Physical Properties at the Mars Exploration Rovers Landing Sites Soil and Rock Physical Properties at the Mars Exploration Rovers Landing Sites

May 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agusm.u44a..05m&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2004, abstract #U44A-05

Other

6225 Mars

Scientific paper

Soil and rock physical properties are being investigated by the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) at Gusev crater (Spirit) and Meridiani Planum (Opportunity). These investigations are being conducted by the MER Athena Science Payload and the mobility systems on each rover. Physical properties of soil units are characterized by observations of wheel tracks (sinkage and tread casts). Images of rover wheel tracks in Gusev crater suggested a variety of surface textures. Traverses through depressions resulted in well-defined wheel track casts, suggesting that finer-grained materials accumulate in these depressions. In other areas, wheel tracks were not as defined and instead, some blocky fragments (e.g., 5-10 mm thick) of soil-like materials were displaced by the wheels. There were areas where small rocks (e.g., 1-3 cm) were pressed into weakly indurated or "crust" material. Soil and rock exposures are very different at Opportunity's landing site within a shallow 20 m crater at Meridiani. Outcrops of very fine-grained bedrock are found around the interior walls of the crater. The dominant soil unit within the crater is dark, fine-sand sized materials littered with larger spherules and spherule fragments (e.g., 1-10 mm); some of these spherules appear to be weathering out of the outcrop. A small-scale rippled soil unit seemingly lacking spherules located near the lowest part of the crater is probably a concentration of the fine-sand sized particles transported and partly reworked by wind. Assessment of initial rover tracks combined with observations of wheel slippage on sloping surfaces suggest that soil cohesion in the uppermost near subsurface material is low, and that finer particles (e.g., less than 30 microns) are also present along with the fine sand-sized particles. Additional investigations are underway to characterize rates of atmospheric dust deposition on the rovers, soil physical properties by trenching into targets of opportunity (e.g., soils, bedforms), surface textural and compositional properties by conducting thermal inertia surveys and photometric observations, soil properties related to rover trafficability, terrain properties by sampling telemetry engineering data during rover traverse, and rock physical properties by grinding into rocks with the Rock Abrasion Tool (i.e., measuring joules required to remove a unit volume of rock and then compared to terrestrial samples).

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