Abundance retrieval of hydrous minerals around the mars science laboratory landing site

The detection of hydrous minerals on Mars is of great importance for revealing the early water environment as well as possible biotic activity. However, few studies focus on quantitatively retrieving hydrous minerals for some difficulties. In this letter, we studied the area around the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) landing site, to identify hydrous minerals and retrieve their abundance. Firstly, the distribution of hydrous minerals was extracted using their water absorption features. Then, a sparse unmixing algorithm was applied along with the CRISM spectral library to retrieve the abundance of hydrous minerals in this area. As a result, seven hydrous minerals were quantitatively retrieved, e.g. actinolite, montmorillonite, saponite, jarosite and so forth, and the total concentration of all hydrous minerals was as high as 40 vol% near the lower reaches of Mount Sharp. Our results were consistent with results from related research and the in-situ analysis of the MSL rover Curiosity.