Zoom Link for Colloquium 05/02/2023 3:00pm PST
Please email astrobio@uw.edu for zoom presentation password
Presented By Melissa Rice Associate Professor of Planetary Science at Western Washington University
In its first two years of exploration in Jezero crater, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has collected samples from igneous rocks on the crater floor, from the sediments at the front of a delta, and from aeolian bedforms. Perseverance cached these samples for their eventual return to Earth, and they will inform the petrologic history of Mars, constrain recent and ancient aqueous processes in Jezero, provide absolute ages for key events, and allow a search for biosignatures. Documenting the geologic context of these invaluable samples is a critical part of Perseverance’s mission, and its Mastcam-Z instrument is unique in that it can quickly acquire spectral information over broad spatial areas. Mastcam-Z is a pair of multispectral, stereoscopic zoom-lens cameras, provides broadband red/green/blue and narrowband visible to near-infrared images (VNIR, 440-1020 nm). Here, I present an overview of the geology of Jezero crater as seen through Mastcam-Z’s multispectral observations, and will discuss implications for habitability in an ancient crater lake on Mars.