Joel A. Hurowitz

TL;DR: The observations suggest that individual lakes were stable on the ancient surface of Mars for 100 to 10,000 years, a minimum duration when each lake was stable both thermally (as liquid water) and in terms of mass balance (with inputs effectively matching evaporation and loss of water to colder regions).

TL;DR: Impure reworked evaporitic sandstones, preserved on Meridiani Planum, Mars, are mixtures of roughly equal amounts of altered siliciclastic debris, of basaltic provenance (40−±10% by mass), and chemical constituents, dominated by evaporitic minerals (jarosite, Mg, Ca-sulfates, chlorides, Fe-, Na-solves), hematite and possibly secondary silica (60−± 10%).

TL;DR: In situ detection of organic matter preserved in lacustrine mudstones at the base of the ~3.5-billion-year-old Murray formation at Pahrump Hills, Gale crater, by the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite onboard the Curiosity rover is reported.

TL;DR: Higher abundances of chlorinated hydrocarbons in the mudstone compared with Rocknest windblown materials previously analyzed by Curiosity suggest that indigenous martian or meteoritic organic carbon sources may be preserved in the Mudstone; however, the carbon source for the chlorinatedHydrocarbons is not definitively of martian origin.

TL;DR: In this paper, the first three drilled samples from the Murray formation, measured in the Pahrump Hills section, were reported, along with full pattern fitting analyses of X-ray diffraction patterns measured by the MSL CheMin instrument.