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TEAM

Mars Mineral Detection: Determining Composition of Mars Rock from X-ray Data

Michele Myong, Sara Mezuri, Katherine Martin, Nikolaos Eptaminitakis, Micheal O Cobhthaigh

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I am a physical chemist by training, and while I work on fairly advanced spectroscopy methods, standard chemical analysis is an important area that can determine the composition of complex mixtures. I was inspired by this past competition hosted by NASA on Driven Data called Mars Spectroscopy: Detect Evidence for Past Habitability https://www.drivendata.org/competitions/93/nasa-mars-spectrometry/page/575/.

Mineral composition of rock is important to understand whether or not Mars ever had livable conditions, an environment that could sustain life. The goal of that competition was to automatically predict the mineral composition of rock directly from the mass spectrometry data. Currently, scientists analyze this manually and improving the rate of data analysis is crucial for missions on Mars where there is limited time for data collection. My current interest is using another dataset from the Mars Rover to predict rock composition from X-ray data.

Please reach out if interested!

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