Document Type
Article
Abstract
Before Perseverance, Jezero crater's floor was variably hypothesized to have a lacustrine, lava, volcanic airfall, or aeolian origin. SuperCam observations in the first 286 Mars days on Mars revealed a volcanic and intrusive terrain with compositional and density stratification.The dominant lithology along the traverse is basaltic, with plagioclase enrichment in stratigraphically higher locations. Stratigraphically lower, layered rocks are richer in normative pyroxene. The lowest observed unit has the highest inferred density and is olivine-rich with coarse (1.5 millimeters) euhedral, relatively unweathered grains, suggesting a cumulate origin. This is the first martian cumulate and shows similarities to martian meteorites, which also express olivine disequilibrium. Alteration materials including carbonates, sulfates, perchlorates, hydrated silicates, and iron oxides are pervasive but low in abundance, suggesting relatively brief lacustrine conditions. Orbital observations link the Jezero floor lithology to the broader Nili-Syrtis region, suggesting that density-driven compositional stratification is a regional characteristic.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Science Advances, Volume 8, Issue 34, 2022.
Rights
© 2022 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.
APA Citation
Wiens, R. C., Udry, A., Beyssac, O., Quantin-Nataf, C., Mangold, N., Cousin, A., Mandon, L., Bosak, T., Forni, O., McLennan, S. M., Sautter, V., Brown, A., Benzerara, K., Johnson, J. R., Mayhew, L., Maurice, S., Anderson, R. B., Clegg, S. M., Crumpler, L., & Gabriel, T. S. J. (2022). Compositionally and density stratified igneous terrain in Jezero crater, Mars. Science Advances, 8(34). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abo3399