Aeolian transport is the most dominant surface process on Mars today and the resulting sedimentary deposits may record the history of the martian climate (Greeley et al, 1992; Grotzinger et al, 2015; Banham et al, 2016). The Dyngjusandur alluvial plain in central Iceland is a unique analogue to deposits in the Stimson Formation in Gale Crater, an aeolian deposited basaltic sandstone (Mangold et al., 2011; Banham et al., 2016; Gupta et al., 2016; Ming et al., 2016). The cold desert climate dominated by aeolian transport found at the Dyngjusandur sandsheet deposits provides a good Martian weathering analogue (Mountney and Russell, 2004). This study aims to provide a characterization of the Dyngjusandur alluvial plain using Mars analogue instrumentation including Visible-Near Infrared (VNIR) reflectance spectroscopy (analogue to CRISM & OMEGA orbital data), X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy (data analogue to CheMin on MSL) and Raman spectroscopy (analogue to SHERLOC and SuperCam on Mars 2020). Compositional identifications for collected samples were compared across these analytical tools to investigate the accuracy and thoroughness of each method as well as potential interactions, such as signal masking, with a number of mineralogical combinations.

Characterization of the Dyngjusandur Alluvial Plain in Iceland with an analogue of a Mars Instrumentation Suite

2019 Spring National Meeting

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