{"id":99054,"date":"2025-02-03T16:47:33","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T21:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=99054"},"modified":"2025-02-12T12:12:25","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T17:12:25","slug":"martian-lava-rocks-shed-light-on-critical-period-of-red-planets-history-says-brock-scientist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2025\/02\/martian-lava-rocks-shed-light-on-critical-period-of-red-planets-history-says-brock-scientist\/","title":{"rendered":"Martian lava rocks shed light on critical period of Red Planet\u2019s history, says Brock scientist"},"content":{"rendered":"

No matter how many missions to Mars she takes part in, the sheer joy of unearthing discoveries about the Red Planet never gets old for Mariek Schmidt.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a new paper, \u201cDiverse and highly differentiated lava suite in Jezero crater, Mars: Constraints on intracrustal magmatism revealed by Mars 2020 PIXL,\u201d published in Science Advances<\/em><\/a>, Schmidt and her international research team shared compelling findings about a critical period of the planet\u2019s evolutionary history.<\/p>\n

The Professor and Chair of Brock University\u2019s Department of Earth Sciences was a Participating Scientist in NASA\u2019s Mars Perseverance rover mission<\/a> and has been analyzing ancient rocks found within Mars\u2019 Jezero Crater. One of the primary mission objectives is to search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, and igneous rocks and regolith examined in the area have also given insight into a time in the planet\u2019s history that has yet to be extensively studied.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re doing things on Mars that have never been done before,\u201d Schmidt says.<\/p>\n

Schmidt is also a Co-Investigator on the Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) team. The PIXL, which is an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer, was used to determine the fine-scale elemental composition of Martian surface materials, allowing the scientists to remotely dive deep into the rocks to investigate how they formed and what they\u2019re made of.<\/p>\n

\"Mariek<\/a>

Mariek Schmidt, Professor and Chair of Brock University\u2019s Department of Earth Sciences (right) and her students, including fourth-year Earth Sciences student Jordyn Schumacher, have been analyzing ancient rocks found within Mars\u2019 Jezero Crater.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe scope of the science has been incredible; it\u2019s the most comprehensive study to date of these samples, that have been cached for Mars Sample Return,\u201d Schmidt says. \u201cWe now know the mineral and rock chemistry and understand the textures, but the next step was to talk about how we think the rocks formed, in terms of magmas rising through and crystallizing in the Martian crust, then evolving and changing composition.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper, released on Friday, Jan. 24, also sets up a series of hypotheses that can guide follow-up research when the samples are brought to Earth years from now. NASA is currently formulating plans to do so in conjunction with the European Space Agency (ESA).<\/p>\n

Tanya Kizovski, co-author on the paper and Associate Curator of Mineralogy at the Royal Ontario Museum, says all of the Martian samples studied on Earth thus far have been meteorites.<\/p>\n

Most of the Martian meteorites are less than 500 million years old \u2014 relatively young compared to Mars\u2019 4.5-billion-year history \u2014 while the samples from Jezero Crater are believed to be at least 3.5 billion years old.<\/p>\n

\u201cMars is very well-preserved in terms of the early history of our solar system, so being able to look at rocks that are this old \u2014 especially when they are brought to Earth \u2014 will help us learn about the history of our inner solar system and when life evolved,\u201d says Kizovski, a postdoctoral fellow at Brock during the project. \u201cWe can also date when igneous rocks crystallized. We can’t do that while the rock is still on Mars, but those samples will be an important anchor we can use to learn about the timing of processes in the region once analyzed here on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The samples also come from a unique time in Mars history, Schmidt says, when the internal dynamics of the planet were undergoing major changes.<\/p>\n

\u201cVolcanism on Mars is really dominated by what we call hot spots \u2014 similar to Earth\u2019s Hawaii or Iceland \u2014 where there’s a focused magma source that\u2019s rooted deep, punches up through everything and then erupts at the surface,\u201d she says. \u201cBut early on in Mars history, there\u2019s modelling to support the idea that the Martian crust was built up by widespread volcanism \u2014 not necessarily focused on those hot spots \u2014 and that transition is thought to have happened around the time that these rocks formed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schmidt and the team still have a while to wait \u2014 potentially a decade or more \u2014 before the samples are planned to land on Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cBringing these samples from Mars will be incredibly challenging and involve an incredible feat of engineering, especially when you consider that you are retrieving something from orbit that is essentially the size of a basketball,\u201d Schmidt says.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the Perseverance rover is still traversing Mars and collecting samples in a new location while Schmidt and her colleagues are patiently awaiting the chance to one day analyze the Martian rocks, Earth-side.<\/p>\n

Schmidt was selected as a Participating Scientist through a NASA program and was supported by a grant from the Canadian Space Agency Mars 2020 Participating Scientist Program.<\/p>\n

More information can be found on the Science Advances<\/em><\/a> and Mars 2020<\/a> websites.<\/p>\n

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