A preliminary research on quantitative retrieval of hydrous minerals around the Mars Science Laboratory landing site

摘要

The detection of hydrous minerals is of great importance in revealing the early water environment and even biotic activities on Mars. However, few studies focus on quantitatively retrieving hydrous minerals due to some problems. In this paper, the area around the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) landing site is studied for quantitatively retrieving hydrous minerals. Firstly, the distribution of hydrous minerals is extracted using water absorption features. Then, sparse unmixing is employed with CRISM spectral library to retrieve the abundance of hydrous minerals in the hydrous region. The results show that seven hydrous minerals are quantitatively retrieved, e.g. actinolite, montmorillonite, saponite, jarosite and so forth, and the total concentration of all hydrous minerals can reach up to 40% near the lower reaches of Mount Sharp.