Abstract

On November 2015, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) announced the landing site of the ExoMars rover in 2022, Oxia Planum, Mars, located southwest of Mawrth Vallis, to the east of the Chryse Planitia Lowlands (Fig. 1). Figure 1: (A) Location of Study Area. (B) Location of the landing-site ellipse in red at the center of the map. The aim of the mission is to investigate traces of past and present life on Mars [1]. The spectral and hyperspectral data of the Observatoire pour la Minéralogie, l’Eau, les Glaces et l’Activité (OMEGA) and the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) show the presence of olivine and phyllosilicates enriched in Fe/Mg [2]. The high resolution images of HiRISE show that terrains on Oxia are often characterized by the presence of pervasive fractures at the meter scale [2]. The trend of fracturing over the landing ellipse may reveal some patterns useful to better understand the geology of the area. In our previous work we have started mapping the fracture patterns at 500x500m and 200x200m survey stations evenly distributed within the ~1400 squared kilometers landing ellipse and analyzed them both from a directional and a dimensional point of view [3]. In this work, we present the mapping of areas of fracture patterns over the whole landing ellipse.