Rare earth element assessment in Jezero crater using the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry on the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance: A case study of cerium
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The “Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry” (PIXL) X-ray spectrometer conducts in situ geochemical analyses of martian rocks and regolith interrogated by the Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance . In addition to quantifying primary rock-forming elements, PIXL can quantify trace elements that in turn can provide additional constraints on the geologic history of Mars. Accurate quantifications of trace elements can require additional analytical techniques to mitigate experimental, background, and crystalline effects within PIXL spectra. In this study, we focus on reducing the impact of these effects and investigate the potential presence of rare earth elements (REEs). The study specifically investigates cerium given its typical relative abundance in many geologic materials compared to other REEs and its potential to mimic fluorescence features produced by organics under deep UV excitation. A detailed analysis of PIXL targets analyzed through the first 887 martian days of the Perseverance mission did not produce any conclusive Ce detections. Phosphorus-enriched materials analyzed by PIXL are estimated to contain sub-675 ppm Ce and sulfate-enriched materials sub-450 ppm Ce. The method presented can help constrain limits on the abundance of additional trace elements of interest that also face a similar analytical burden. PIXL's potential to assess REE abundances, outside of yttrium, is limited for expected concentrations in surface materials. Determining most REE concentrations in materials interrogated by Perseverance will therefore likely require terrestrial analyses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".