TES Mineral Maps (Description)

TES Mineral Maps

The colorized versions of these maps were generated by assigning a "black-body" color spectrum to 8-bit grayscale images generated and supplied by Josh Bandfield, and underlaying MOLA shaded-relief maps of the terrain. In the original grayscale images, a pixel value of 0 corresponds to no data, a pixel value of 1 is 0% and a pixel value of 255 corresponds to 100% of the strongest signal seen in individual TES spectra. The colorized images have been adjusted so that the "hottest" areas correspond to the maximum signal found in the +15 ° to -15 ° region.

Note that errors vary because of the mix of atmospheric conditions and surface temperature and can be as high as 30% or as low as 5%. These maps should be used qualitatively and with some common sense. This is particularly true of the "andesite" map which has a higher noise level than the basalt and hematite. The "andesite" map is a map of basaltic andesite/andesite abundance.

Reference for the andesite map and basalt map:

Bandfield, J.L., V.E. Hamilton, and P.R. Christensen, A global view of Martian surface compositions from MGS-TES Science, 287, 1626-1630, 2000.

References for the hematite map:

Christensen, P.R. et al., Detection of crystalline hematite mineralization on Mars by the Thermal Emission Spectrometer, J. Geophys. Res., 105, 9632-9642, 2000.

Christensen, P.R., M.C. Malin, R.V. Morris, J.L. Bandfield, and M.D. Lane, Aqueous sedimentary mineralization of the Martian surface: Evidence for liquid water, in review at J. Geophys. Res., 2000.