Rock Of The Month For 2008-03-28

This week’s Rock of the Week is a basalt. Prashad picked up RATW06325 from a quarry near Wahagoan in the Sahyadri Mountain Range in north central India, which is at the southern edge of a region where large amounts of flood lavas flowed over the surface about 65 million years ago. The flood lavas cooled quickly to produce a fine-grained igneous rock we call basalt, and these basalts in India are known as Deccan basalts. The Deccan basalt is a great example of what most basalts on Mars are like. Spectrally, the Deccan basalt is just like the orbital thermal infrared data from the Thermal Emission Spectrometer, http://tes.asu.edu/, of the equatorial regions of Mars, including the two Mars Rover sites. As scientists in the Mars Space Flight Facility had been studying some Deccan basalt they collected in the northeastern extent of the Deccan basalts, and the locations of the large Deccan region is well-known, they scanned the RATW location database to see if anyone sent in other Deccan basalt. They appreciate Pratap for sending in this piece from the southern extent of the Deccan. Thanks, Pratap! This particular piece of Deccan basalt has some clay producing a shiny texture on the top. As you can see from this spectral plot, the clay has a different spectrum than fresh Deccan basalt. What is the composition of fresh Deccan basalt and likely those equatorial regions of Mars? Click on the spectrum and then the igneous spectral library to find out!

Thanks for sending in such a cool rock!

Check out our previous rocks of the month: