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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter January 29, 2018

Laboratory and field characterization of visible to near-infrared spectral reflectance of nitrate minerals from the Atacama Desert, Chile, and implications for Mars

  • Fan Wang , Brenda B. Bowen EMAIL logo , Ji-Hye Seo and Greg Michalski
From the journal American Mineralogist

Abstract

Large amounts of nitrate salts occur in very specific environments and somewhat rare hyper-arid conditions, which may provide clues to fundamentally different nitrogen cycling and life survival mechanisms. Remote detection of ancient and modern nitrates on Earth and on other planetary bodies where they may occur requires a detailed understanding of their visible to near infrared (VNIR) spectral signatures. This study explores the VNIR spectral characteristics of several synthetic nitrate salts, sulfate minerals, and nitrate-bearing field samples from the Atacama Desert, Chile, to identify diagnostic spectral features of nitrate and possible interferences from other coexisting minerals. Results indicated that most of the nitrate salts have characteristic absorptions around 1.81, 1.94, 2.06, 2.21, and 2.42 μm. A significant positive correlation exists between the continuum-removed band depths of the 2.42 μm absorption and nitrate contents for the Atacama regolith samples, especially for samples with >10 wt% nitrate. The five absorption features of nitrate in the field spectra collected from multiple nitrate-rich regions in the Atacama Desert were then evaluated to determine the variabilities in these features in natural settings, while the band depths of 2.42 μm absorption were further calculated on the continuum-removed field spectra to estimate the nitrate abundances at the study sites. This work will supplement spectral libraries where nitrate spectra are lacking and have implications for future comparisons to planetary spectra to search for potentially life-related nitrate on Mars.


† Special collection papers can be found online at http://www.minsocam.org/MSA/AmMin/special-collections.html.


Acknowledgments

The data collection was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation Grant (EAR 0922114) to G.M., the Mineralogical Society of America Graduate Student Research Grant to F.W., and several fellowships from Purdue University to F.W. (Purdue Climate Change Research Center fellowship, Purdue Research Foundation research assistantship and Purdue Bilsland Dissertation fellowship). The data analysis and paper writing were mainly conducted at Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School supported by the postdoctoral funding from Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. We thank Raul Ochoa for his assistance in the lab and field. We are also grateful to Keith Putirka (editor), Javier Cuadros (associate editor), and two reviewers for valuable suggestions that helped greatly improve this paper.

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Received: 2017-3-17
Accepted: 2017-10-3
Published Online: 2018-1-29
Published in Print: 2018-2-23

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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