earth and planetary science

Planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have received a $279,639, three-year grant from the NASA Mars Fundamental Research Program for a project that seeks to determine how clay minerals formed on Mars and ways they have been altered since then.

In June, a rover named Zoe set out into the Atacama Desert on the west coast of South America to test a suite of instruments intended for future missions to Mars under Mars-like conditions. One of the instruments aboard Zoe was a Raman spectrometer designed by a team led by Alian Wang of Washington University in St. Louis. A fragile lab instrument that was ruggidized to survive the desert, the Raman spectrometer is expected to fly on the 2020 Mars mission.