Alteration history of Séítah formation rocks inferred by PIXL x-ray fluorescence, x-ray diffraction, and multispectral imaging on Mars

Creators: Tice, Michael M.; Hurowitz, Joel A.; Allwood, Abigail C.; Jones, Michael W. M.; Orenstein, Brendan J.; Davidoff, Scott; Wright, Austin P.; Pedersen, David A. K.; Henneke, Jesper; Tosca, Nicholas J.; Moore, Kelsey R.; Clark, Benton C.; McLennan, Scott M.; Flannery, David T.; Steele, Andrew; Brown, Adrian J.; Zorzano, Maria-Paz; Hickman-Lewis, Keyron; Liu, Yang; VanBommel, Scott J.; Schmidt, Mariek E.; Kizovski, Tanya V.; Treiman, Allan H.; O'Neil, Lauren; Fairén, Alberto G.; Shuster, David L.; Gupta, Sanjeev; PIXL Team

Abstract

Collocated crystal sizes and mineral identities are critical for interpreting textural relationships in rocks and testing geological hypotheses, but it has been previously impossible to unambiguously constrain these properties using in situ instruments on Mars rovers. Here, we demonstrate that diffracted and fluoresced x-rays detected by the PIXL instrument (an x-ray fluorescence microscope on the Perseverance rover) provide information about the presence or absence of coherent crystalline domains in various minerals. X-ray analysis and multispectral imaging of rocks from the Séítah formation on the floor of Jezero crater shows that they were emplaced as coarsely crystalline igneous phases. Olivine grains were then partially dissolved and filled by finely crystalline or amorphous secondary silicate, carbonate, sulfate, and chloride/oxychlorine minerals. These results support the hypothesis that Séítah formation rocks represent olivine cumulates altered by fluids far from chemical equilibrium at low water-rock ratios.

Additional Information

© 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). We are grateful to Mars 2020 team members who participated in tactical and strategic science operations. We acknowledge T. Wang (Central Analytical Research Facility, Queensland University of Technology) for assistance with theoretically modeling EDXRD. The work described in this paper was partially carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a prime contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). M.M.T., J.A.H., A.C.A., S.D., A.P.W., K.R.M., B.C.C., S.M.M., A.S., A.J.B., Y.L., A.H.T., and L.O. were supported by NASA grant 80NM0018D0004 through J.P.L. S.J.V. and D.L.S. were supported by the NASA M2020 Participating Scientist Programs. M.E.S. and T.V.K. were supported by the Canadian Space Agency M2020 Participating Scientist grants. K.H.-L. was supported by a UK Space Agency Aurora Research Fellowship. A.G.F. was supported by the European Research Council CoG no. 818602. S.G. was supported by the U.K. Space Agency and Royal Society (SRF\R1\21000106). D.T.F. was supported by Australian Research Council grant DE210100205. D.A.K.P. and J.H. were supported by the National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark. N.J.T. was supported by the Cambridge University. S.G. was supported by the Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship (SRF\R1\21000106) and the U.K. Space Agency (grant numbers: ST/X002373/1 and ST/S001492/1). Author contributions: M.M.T. led the writing of the manuscript. M.M.T., J.A.H., A.C.A., M.W.M.J., B.J.O., S.D., A.P.W., D.A.K.P., J.H., N.J.T., K.R.M., B.C.C., S.M.M., D.T.F., A.S., A.J.B., M.P.Z., K.H.L., Y.L., and S.J.V. prepared the original draft with input from A.G.F., D.L.S., and S.G. All authors provided input to the manuscript through discussion, editing, or reviewing. M.M.T., J.A.H., A.C.A., M.W.M.J., B.J.O., D.A.K.P., J.H., N.J.T., K.R.M., B.C.C., D.T.F., Y.L., S.J.V., M.E.S., T.V.K., A.H.T., and L.O. contributed to the design, execution, and analysis of PIXL observations. All authors contributed to the selection and geologic interpretation of the rocks discussed here. M.M.T., M.W.M.J., B.J.O., S.D., A.P.W., D.A.K.P., J.H., and B.C.C. performed data processing and analysis. M.M.T., M.W.M.J., B.J.O., S.D., A.P.W., D.A.K.P., J.H., and B.C.C. prepared visualizations. Project management of the PIXL investigation was by A.C.A. and J.A.H. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. PIXL images and data used in this paper are available on the Planetary Data System (PDS; doi:10.17189/1522645; https://pds.nasa.gov/ds-view/pds/viewBundle.jsp?identifier=urn%3Anasa%3Apds%3Amars2020_pixl&version=1.0). The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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