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Lecturer: Dr. Joel Hurowitz, SUNY Stony Brook and a Deputy Principal Investigator in NASA's 2020 Rover mission. For nearly a decade, the international program of Mars exploration has been guided by a remarkably useful framework that describes how Mars’ environmental conditions have evolved in the context of time-dependent changes in the composition of rock and soil deposits at the Martian surface. Built on the basis of observations by the instruments onboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter, this framework describes an early era of Earth-like surface environments that gave way to a far more arid environment in which surface water was acidic and salt-rich. Ongoing observations by Mars Express and the higher-resolution instruments onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have continued to refine and extend this paradigm, but as is the case on Earth, the greatest insight into the evolution of surface environments comes from close-up examination of the sedimentary rock record. In-situ observations of sedimentary rocks by NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers enable evaluation of hypotheses developed from orbit, and reveal that interactions between iron-rich waters and the atmosphere have played a critical role in the evolution of the Martian surface.
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