| Title: |
Carbonated ultramafic igneous rocks in Jezero crater, Mars |
| Authors: |
Williford, Kenneth H.; Farley, Kenneth A.; Horgan, Briony H.N.; Garczynski, Brad; Treiman, Allan H.; Gupta, Sanjeev; Jones, Alexander J.; Siljeström, Sandra; Clavé, Elise; Mayhew, Lisa; Osterhout, Jeffrey T.; Ravanis, Eleni; Stack, Kathryn M.; Fagents, Sarah; Bedford, Candice C.; Bosak, Tanja; Bykov, Sergei V.; Flannery, David; Hand, Kevin P.; Jones, Michael W. M.; Kah, Linda; Klidaras, Athanasios; Maki, Justin; Mandon, Lucia; Mansbach, Elias; McCubbin, Francis M.; Simon, Justin I.; Srivastava, Anushree; Uckert, Kyle; Wiens, Roger C.; Alwmark, Sanna; Aramendia, Julene; Barnes, Robert; Beck, Pierre; Bell, James F.; Bernard, Sylvain; Bhartia, Rohit; Bramble, Michael S.; Brown, Adrian J.; Broz, Adrian; Buckner, Denise; Catling, David C.; Cloutis, Edward; Connell, Stephanie; Corpolongo, Andrea; Czaja, Andrew D.; Dehouck, Erwin; Fornaro, Teresa; Forni, Olivier; Haney, Nikole C.; Hickman-Lewis, Keyron; Hug, William; Koeppel, Ari; Madariaga, Juan Manuel; Martínez-Frías, Jesús; Núñez, Jorge I.; Orenstein, Brendan J.; Phua, Yu Yu; Pilorget, Cedric; Randazzo, Nicolas; Royer, Clément; Scheller, Eva L.; Schmitz, Nicole; Schröder, Susanne; Sephton, Mark A.; Sharma, Shiv; Sharma, Sunanda; Shuster, David; Sinclair, Kimberly P.; Steele, Andrew; Tate, Christian; Weiss, Benjamin; Williams, Amy J.; Wolf, Z. Uriah; Yingst, R. Aileen |
| Source: |
Science, 391(6787), eadu8264, (2026-02-19) |
| Publisher Information: |
American Association for the Advancement of Science |
| Publication Year: |
2026 |
| Collection: |
Caltech Authors (California Institute of Technology) |
| Description: |
The Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars, which once contained a lake of liquid water. We report the rock properties encountered by Perseverance during a ten-kilometer traverse extending over 400 meters in elevation, from beneath Jezero's western sedimentary fan to the upper crater rim. These rocks consist of coarse-grained olivine, magnesium- and iron-carbonates, silica, and phyllosilicates, including some of the oldest materials exposed within Jezero. We infer these rocks formed by olivine accumulation in an igneous system of layered intrusions, followed by exposure to water and carbon dioxide that caused extensive carbonation of the silicate minerals. Aqueous alteroverlingation is more pronounced at lower elevations. Higher elevation exposures on the crater rim appear similar to olivine-rich rocks distributed over the wider Nili Fossae region. ; © 2026 the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original US government works. https://www.science.org/about/science-licenses-journal-article-reuse . ; We thank A. Hofmann and two anonymous reviewers for comments that substantially improved this manuscript. We acknowledge E. Cardarelli and S.-E. Hamran for help with Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment data. This work would have been impossible without the dedicated team of people who designed, built, and operate the Mars 2020 spacecraft. ; K.H.W. was supported by Mars 2020 SHERLOC JPL subcontract 1679020. K.A.F., J.T.O., K.M.S., K.P.H., J.M., K.U., and M.B. acknowledge work carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (80NM0018D0004). B.H., B.G., E.R., S.F., J.F.B., J.N., and A.Kl. were funded by NASA’s Mars 2020 Project through a subcontract from the California Institute of Technology/JPL to Arizona State University (subcontract 1511125). S.G. and R.Ba. were supported by UK Space Agency ... |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| Language: |
English |
| Relation: |
https://authors.library.caltech.edu/communities/caltechauthors/; https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adu8264; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41405541/ |
| DOI: |
10.1126/science.adu8264 |
| Availability: |
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adu8264; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41405541/ |
| Rights: |
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess ; No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided. |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.523790CE |
| Database: |
BASE |