Friday

Meteorites on the surfaces of other planets has become an increasingly important topic in meteoritics over the last few years. So far over 50 meteorites have been found on the surface of Mars, including 15 officially noted by the meteoritical society. Meteorites can act as a witness plate throughout geological time and provide valuable insight into the history of the site: Chemical and Physical weathering can provide information on climate weathering rates and water-rock interactions; meteorite size and distribution can help infer information about the density of the atmosphere; and chondritic materials could be a potential delivery mechanism for organic materials to Mars. Statistically, Martian rovers have a significantly higher find per mile success rate than dedicated meteorite hunts on Earth and we look to maintain this search capability with the ExoMars Mission. The PanCam instrument, with both the high-resolution camera (HRC) and Multispectral wide-angle cameras (WACs), will be the primary mode of scientific imaging during the ExoMars mission. As such preparations to maximise scientific return and expedite interpretation and analysis of potential meteorite samples is important. Iron, Stony and Stony-Iron meteorites show distinct variation across the VNIR spectral range of PanCam captured by the 12-position multispectral instrument. Here we report on our work to prepare the ExoMars PanCam instrument to search for meteorites of the surface of Mars using spectral interpretation tools and spectral parameter mapping, utilising the Natural History Museum London’s meteorite collections.