Researchers at UMass Amherst help discover new mineral on Mars

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have helped identify a new mineral on Mars, according to a release from the university.

The UMass Amherst researchers were part of a team that identified ferric hydroxysulfate, a mineral unique to Mars that may provide clues about the planet’s history and potential to have supported life.

Mario Parente, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass, Arun M. Saranathan, a graduate research assistant at UMass from 2013 to 2021, and Yuki Itoh, a Ph.D student at UMass from 2013 to 2022, co-authored a paper documenting the discovery along with researchers from NASA and other universities.

In 2010, researchers discovered a band of minerals that exhbited a spectral signature not consistent with any known mineral. Parente and his team created an advanced atmospheric correction algorithm tailored to Mars that revealed other spots on the planet with the same spectral band and clarified other spectral features.

“The data that comes out of the spectrometer is not usable the way it is,” Parente said in the release.

Using the new information from the algorithm, researchers at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center were able to recreate and identify ferric hydroxysulfate in a lab.

They found that the mineral forms at temperatures from 50 to 100 degrees Celsius in an acidic environment and in the presence of oxygen and water, according to the release.

The researchers were also able to conclude that mineral was formed through volcanic heating during the Amazonian period, less than 3 billion years ago.

“The presence of this mineral puts a lot more nuance on what was going on,” Parente said in the release. “Parts of Mars have been chemically and thermally active more recently than we once believed—offering new insight into the planet’s dynamic surface and its potential to have supported life.”