The results are presented in a pair of papers, written by John, Lucie Riu and colleagues. Lucie was at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), Japanese Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA), Sagamihara, Japan, when part of the work was performed but is now an ESA Research Fellow at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Madrid.

With the basic detections in hand, Lucie decided to take the next step and quantify the amounts of the minerals that were present. “If we know where, and in which percentage each mineral is present, it gives us a better idea of how those minerals could have been formed,” she says.

This work also gives mission planners some great candidates for future landing sites – for two reasons. Firstly, the aqueous minerals still contain water molecules. Together with known locations of buried water-ice, this provides possible locations for extracting water for In-situ Resource Utilisation, key to the establishment of human bases on Mars. Clays and salts are also common building material on Earth.