Orbital Spectral Mapping of Surface Compositions in the Antarctic Dry Valleys: Regional Distributions of Secondary Mineral-phases as Climate Indicators and Implications for Mars

The dominance of cold and dry alteration processes on recent Mars, as revealed through pan-spectral orbital analyses

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Classic low-albedo regions of the martian surface are investigated using combined reflectance and emission (" pan-spectral ") data to constrain the types of alteration mineral phases that are present at spectrally significant abundances (>10–15%). The lack of hydrated mineral species observed using near-infrared data suggests that anhydrous chemical alterat...

Antarctic dry valleys: Microclimate zonation, variable geomorphic processes, and implications for assessing climate change on Mars

The Antarctic Dry Valleys (ADV) are generally classified as a hyper-arid, cold-polar desert. The region has long been considered an important terrestrial analog for Mars because of its generally cold and dry climate and because it contains a suite of landforms at macro-, meso-, and microscales that closely resemble those occurring on the martian surface. The extreme hyperaridity of both Mars an...

Comparison of different algorithms for land use mapping in dry climate using satellite images: a case study of the Central regions of Iran

The objective of this research was to determine the best model and compare performances in terms of producing landuse maps from six supervised classification algorithms. As a result, different algorithms such as the minimum distance ofmean (MDM), Mahalanobis distance (MD), maximum likelihood (ML), artificial neural network (ANN), spectral anglemapper (SAM), and support vector machine (SVM) were...

Physical Controls on Antarctic Dry Valleys Permafrost Geomorphol- Ogy and Soil Ecosystem Habitability: Cold-desert Processes and Mars Astrobiological Implications

Mineralogical analyses of surface sediments in the Antarctic Dry Valleys: coordinated analyses of Raman spectra, reflectance spectra and elemental abundances.

Surface sediments at Lakes Fryxell, Vanda and Brownworth in the Antarctic Dry Valleys (ADV) were investigated as analogues for the cold, dry environment on Mars. Sediments were sampled from regions surrounding the lakes and from the ice cover on top of the lakes. The ADV sediments were studied using Raman spectra of individual grains and reflectance spectra of bulk particulate samples and compa...