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Published December 3, 2004 | public
Journal Article

Soils of Eagle Crater and Meridiani Planum at the Opportunity Rover Landing Site

Abstract

The soils at the Opportunity site are fine-grained basaltic sands mixed with dust and sulfate-rich outcrop debris. Hematite is concentrated in spherules eroded from the strata. Ongoing saltation exhumes the spherules and their fragments, concentrating them at the surface. Spherules emerge from soils coated, perhaps from subsurface cementation, by salts. Two types of vesicular clasts may represent basaltic sand sources. Eolian ripples, armored by well-sorted hematite-rich grains, pervade Meridiani Planum. The thickness of the soil on the plain is estimated to be about a meter. The flatness and thin cover suggest that the plain may represent the original sedimentary surface.

Additional Information

© 2004 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 10 September 2004; accepted 28 October 2004. The research described in this paper was partially carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 19, 2023