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Project Progress

Our focus over the past year was a) to investigate the use of visible-near infrared spectroscopy of Rio Tinto to develop tools for recognizing habitable environments and b) investigating Mars data sets for habitable environments. The field and remotely acquired data of Rio Tinto collected in 2005 were reduced and analyzed. These data reveal a diverse range of sulfate and iron oxide minerals are readily identified by the tools for visible-near infrared spectroscopy
(Figure 1) including hematite, goethite, and a range of ferric and ferrous sulfates. Habitability through these observations is related to the diversity of mineralogy; sites with more diverse mineralogy are more commonly associated with biological activity and thus habitability. Through the use of remotely acquired data, we determined the effects of reducing spatial scale on the ability to resolve complex mineralogic environments, and, as expected, coarser spatial scales resolve less mineralogic diversity. However, we developed an approach to recognize mineralogic complexity at these reduced spatial resolutions, in essence sub-pixel complexity, that will be very powerful in searching Mars data bases to identify mineralogic complexity and thus promising sites for detailed investigation.

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One of the key ingredients for habitability is water, and we have been investigating the evidence for and models of climate change on Mars that are largely recorded in the history of glacial deposits. These results indicate that climate change has occurred frequently and has resulted in frequent re-distributions of water ice on the planet impacting habitability over geologic time scales. We have also identified and mapped diverse phyllosilicate deposits on Mars (Figure 2) and shown that these deposits are restricted to the earliest periods of Mars history. Phyllosilicate deposits signal environments where water was abundant, long lived, and resulting in alteration. These characteristics suggest a new class of habitable environment for Mars that should be more thoroughly investigated.

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