Curiosity Mission Yields First Confirmation Of Mineral Mapped From Orbit

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
NASA’s Curiosity rover team announced a major milestone on Tuesday, as samples obtained from the base of Mount Sharp in late September provided the mission’s first confirmation of a mineral previously mapped from orbit.
The samples, collected by Curiosity from a target known as Confidence Hills within the Pahrump Hills rock outcrop, was found by the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument to contain far more hematite than any rock or soil sample analyzed to date during the two-year-old mission, the US space agency explained.
Hematite is an iron-oxide mineral which reveals clues about the ancient environmental conditions that were present when it formed. In 2010, prior to the selection of Curiosity’s landing site, instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided evidence of the mineral in the geological unit that includes Pahrump Hills.
“This connects us with the mineral identifications from orbit, which can now help guide our investigations as we climb the slope and test hypotheses derived from the orbital mapping,” Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger, a geology professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, explained in a statement.

Image Above: Signature of Hematite in ‘Confidence Hills’ Martian Rock. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“We’ve reached the part of the crater where we have the mineralogical information that was important in selection of Gale Crater as the landing site,” added Curiosity science team member Ralph Milliken, an assistant professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and head of the team that identified minerals based on observations of Mount Sharp using the orbiter’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM).
“We’re now on a path where the orbital data can help us predict what minerals we’ll find and make good choices about where to drill,” Milliken noted. “Analyses like these will help us place rover-scale observations into the broader geologic history of Gale that we see from orbital data.”
Rocks previously analyzed by Curiosity were found to contain magnetite and other iron-oxide minerals, according to NASA, and one way to form hematite is to put magnetite in oxidizing conditions. The most recent sample was found to contain approximately eight percent hematite and four percent magnetite, while samples collected en route to Mount Sharp were found to contain a maximum of one percent hematite and far larger amounts of magnetite.
CheMin Deputy Principal Investigator David Vaniman of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said that there was “more oxidation involved in the new sample,” and even though it was only partially oxidized, the preservation of magnetite and olivine indicates a gradient of oxidation levels. That gradient, NASA officials explained, could have provided a source of chemical energy for microbes.
The Pahrump Hills outcrop where the most recent samples were found include several layers uphill from its lowest tier, which is where the Confidence Hills sample was obtained from. These layers vary in texture, and the Curiosity team believes that they could also vary in concentrations of hematite and other minerals. The NASA researchers are now using the rover to survey the outcrop and assess possible targets for close inspection and drilling.
“The mission may spend weeks to months at Pahrump Hills before proceeding farther up the stack of geological layers forming Mount Sharp,” the agency said. “Those higher layers include an erosion-resistant band of rock higher on Mount Sharp with such a strong orbital signature of hematite, it is called ‘Hematite Ridge.’ The target drilled at Pahrump Hills is much softer and more deeply eroded than Hematite Ridge.”
—–
Shop Amazon.com – LEGO Ideas NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover 21104
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.