Exploring the Mantle of Mars

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Exploring the Mantle of Mars

Postby David Entwistle » Sat Oct 27, 2012 2:34 am

:geek: G. Jeffrey Taylor and Linda M. V. Martel, from the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology have provided a summary report from the recent meeting Exploring the Mantle of Mars. You can read the report on the Planetary Science Research Discoveries (PSRD) web site here, or in pdf form here.

About 65 Mars specialists met at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, September 10-12, 2012, to discuss what we know about the mantle of Mars from meteorites, high-pressure experiments, geophysical and remote sensing data, and theory. The valuable but incomplete meteorite record shows clearly that Mars melted and differentiated into a dense iron-rich core and rocky mantle 4.5 billion years ago. This event produced chemically distinct regions of the mantle that finally melted hundreds of millions of years ago to make the magmas that produced the meteorites. Other melting events produced the older portions of the crust, most of which formed before 3.5 billion years ago. Still unknown are how many distinctive source regions formed, when they melted to form magmas, how they melted, the vigor of mantle convection and how the distinctive regions were preserved during convection, and whether the mantle has mineralogical changes with depth. Planetary scientists hope that additional meteorite samples, the current Curiosity rover mission, the geophysical InSight mission, and the future Mars Sample Return mission will give them crucial information to answer these questions.
David Entwistle
 
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