Every year, much of the planetary science community gather at the Lunar and Planetary Science conference in Houston. It is one of the times that the Curiosity results are first presented beyond the MSL team and discussed. I will be presenting some of our team’s results that use the ChemCam data on the igneous clasts that have been identified during Curiosity’s drive.
ChemCam has now made over 300,000 laser shots so in order to show data as on the figure here, we have used density contours – an equal amount of data is present between each contour for both sedimentary outcrops (in red) and igneous clasts (in blue) fields. The composition of the sediments is very similar to the composition of basalts found previously at the MER Gusev site, suggesting an important igneous rock type in the ancient highlands, and a major source for the sediments. However, notably Gale igneous rocks contain more fractionated i.e. silica and alkali-rich compositions. This suggests that parts of the martian crust have been differentiated from a purely basaltic composition, probably by crystal fractionation in crustal magma chambers.
The conference link is here:
http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2016/
and the ChemCam abstract is here:
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