Posted by tourdemars to Reconnaissance Orbiter at December 15, 2009 10:08 PM

Catherine Weitz, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, has reported new evidence for multiple, water-related geologic processes on Mars. She and her colleagues studied light-toned deposits (LTDs) within troughs of the Noctis Labyrinthus region in western Valles Marineris using data gathered by three Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) instruments: the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, the Context Camera (CTX) and the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM). Weitz presented the research results today during a morning session of the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco, Calif. "We analyzed ten troughs containing well-exposed LTDs, and we found a lot of variability that we didn't expect to see," she said. "We found that each of the troughs with LTDs has a unique mineralogy, and, therefore, the processes occurring in each trough were very localized."