Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OCEANID (The quest for oceanic sediments within the Ancient Martian sedimentary record)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28
The Martian missions have gradually revealed that Mars abounds with evidence of a full ancient hydrological system favourable to life emergence. If so, there is every reasons to believe that Mars has hosted a hemispheric ocean covering the northern lowlands. This hypothesis is as old as Mars exploration, but has been repeatedly challenged over the past two decades. The case of primitive Martian ocean remains one of the planet’s most controversial and unsolved issue.
Recent discoveries are re-opening this question mainly highlighting that the main oceanic activity may be older than we thought with related deposits partly exhumed and two rovers (Mars2020/NASA arrived in 2021 and ExoMars/ESA-Roskosmos to be launched in 2022) have landing sites in the oldest terrains never explored on Mars, displaying sediments possibly linked with an ocean system.
To wind up the debate, the identification of ancient deposits of the same age, same composition with a global distribution in agreement with a possible ocean level is required. But such clues are small scale exposures solved only by high-resolution orbital data set (>10 To of data) or by in situ exploration preventing a forward link to the global context. Oceanid proposes to face this challenge by investigating at different scale: global, mesoscale and microscale using complementary dataset (orbital, in situ and experimental data). Oceanid will also lie on innovative methodology of orbital data mining: geological object recognition by artificial intelligence, erosion/deposition evolution models, clustering from multi-type of data…
Oceanid objectives are to describe the early Martian sedimentary record accumulated below possible global ocean levels, to establish a fine-scale chronology of primitive events, to contextualize Mars2020 and ExoMars missions within the global ancient hydrological system and to correlate the oceanic context, the transient water cycle, and the mineralogy observed both from orbit and in situ.
Recent discoveries are re-opening this question mainly highlighting that the main oceanic activity may be older than we thought with related deposits partly exhumed and two rovers (Mars2020/NASA arrived in 2021 and ExoMars/ESA-Roskosmos to be launched in 2022) have landing sites in the oldest terrains never explored on Mars, displaying sediments possibly linked with an ocean system.
To wind up the debate, the identification of ancient deposits of the same age, same composition with a global distribution in agreement with a possible ocean level is required. But such clues are small scale exposures solved only by high-resolution orbital data set (>10 To of data) or by in situ exploration preventing a forward link to the global context. Oceanid proposes to face this challenge by investigating at different scale: global, mesoscale and microscale using complementary dataset (orbital, in situ and experimental data). Oceanid will also lie on innovative methodology of orbital data mining: geological object recognition by artificial intelligence, erosion/deposition evolution models, clustering from multi-type of data…
Oceanid objectives are to describe the early Martian sedimentary record accumulated below possible global ocean levels, to establish a fine-scale chronology of primitive events, to contextualize Mars2020 and ExoMars missions within the global ancient hydrological system and to correlate the oceanic context, the transient water cycle, and the mineralogy observed both from orbit and in situ.
OCEANID team did a strong effort in methodical development. The team developed a pipeline of surface clutter simulation applied to SHARAD data using high resolution topography in the framework of the open platform MarsSi (https://marssi.univ-lyon1.fr/MarsSI/(opens in new window)). These developments are interdisciplinary efforts between physical signal processing and geoscience applications. The use of high-resolution digital elevation models at about 6m/pixel to conduct such surface clutter simulation is beyond the state of the art which use topogrpahy at 200m/pixels. The goals of developing such tools under MarsSI plateform is to enable a wide use of these developments by the 800 users of the platform beyond OCEANID project. We also developed visualization tools to enable the location of the radar track in other georeferenced data set as well as tools to navigate within both simulated and observed radargrams. The team is developing AI-based tools using state of the art image segmentation AI to conduct automatic detection of small impact craters in high resolution Martian images. The team also conducted development to use the small crater identification within high resolution images (25 cm/pix) to allow erosion rate inversion using both the size and the depth frequency distribution of impact crater. The team also developed innovative methods of hyperspectral orbital analysis to reduce the noise and highlight water-related spectral features in the goal to document sediment composition. We developed custom Python scripts to correct both OMEGA and CRISM cubes, map spectral criteria, and project raster data. Extraction of regions of interest (ROIs) and spectral analysis was done in QGIS using the EnMAP-Box, an open source plugin we contributed to improve. It can be applied to Orbital hyperspectral data (Both CRISM and OMEGA) , but also to the data to be acquired by the lab camera.
Oceanid team made significant progress in studying the sediments of the main delta fan of Jezero crater, the landing site of Mars2020 mission, the first example of noachian sediments ever explored in situ. The team led the combination of geochemical and mineral data of the deltaic sediments collected by Perseverance to reconstruct to past Martian conditions during open standing body of water existed as well as the erosional source change of the sediments. The team is also highly involved in the Supercam data analysis and contributed to the geological and geochemical context description of the first potential biosignature in the sediments observed with Neretva Vallis, the inlet valley of Jezero former lake and participated to the understanding of the water related processes within the floor of Jezero crater.
The team worked on key sediments along the Martian dichotomy in term of sedimentary record and composition. We highlighted subsurface deposits enriched in salts potentially buried ocean related evaporites. We also studied in detail the phyllosilicates bearing layers exposed in Oxia Planum (the landing site of the postponed Exomars mission) highlighting that they are way more extend that previously suggested. This has strong implication on the extend of putative ocean in case these sediments are ocean-related.
The team also conducted a field trip to collect Martian analogs in Iceland. Iceland is mainly made of basalts, the most common rock on Mars. We focused our sampling along source to sink transect in the watershed of the southern part of Iceland. We collected about 100 kg of rocks in the goals to analyse them with lab hyperspectral camera.
Oceanid team made significant progress in studying the sediments of the main delta fan of Jezero crater, the landing site of Mars2020 mission, the first example of noachian sediments ever explored in situ. The team led the combination of geochemical and mineral data of the deltaic sediments collected by Perseverance to reconstruct to past Martian conditions during open standing body of water existed as well as the erosional source change of the sediments. The team is also highly involved in the Supercam data analysis and contributed to the geological and geochemical context description of the first potential biosignature in the sediments observed with Neretva Vallis, the inlet valley of Jezero former lake and participated to the understanding of the water related processes within the floor of Jezero crater.
The team worked on key sediments along the Martian dichotomy in term of sedimentary record and composition. We highlighted subsurface deposits enriched in salts potentially buried ocean related evaporites. We also studied in detail the phyllosilicates bearing layers exposed in Oxia Planum (the landing site of the postponed Exomars mission) highlighting that they are way more extend that previously suggested. This has strong implication on the extend of putative ocean in case these sediments are ocean-related.
The team also conducted a field trip to collect Martian analogs in Iceland. Iceland is mainly made of basalts, the most common rock on Mars. We focused our sampling along source to sink transect in the watershed of the southern part of Iceland. We collected about 100 kg of rocks in the goals to analyse them with lab hyperspectral camera.
One of the goals of Oceanid was to document buried layers in the lowlands. The discovery of mud volcanoes is a major discovery attesting of the existence of buried layers bearing altered minerals
The pipeline we developed for Sharad data has a huge potential to highlight buried layers and is an innovative pipeline.
Jezero crater rim exposed the oldest rock ever explored in situ by a rover. Results from the crater rim campaign (started end of 2024) will be rich in discoveries.
The pipeline we developed for Sharad data has a huge potential to highlight buried layers and is an innovative pipeline.
Jezero crater rim exposed the oldest rock ever explored in situ by a rover. Results from the crater rim campaign (started end of 2024) will be rich in discoveries.