Chemistry Nexus

A NASA press release indicates that NASA’s Spirit, the first of two Mars Exploration Rovers on the surface within Mars’ Gusev crater, has identified carbonate minerals “in the rover’s first survey of the site with its infrared sensing instrument, called the miniature thermal emission spectrometer or Mini-TES. Carbonates form in the presence of water, but it’s too early to tell whether the amounts detected come from interaction with water vapor in Mars’ atmosphere or are evidence of a watery local environment in the past, scientists emphasized.”