The Mars Target Encyclopedia Now Includes Mars Pathfinder and Mars Phoenix Targets

Introduction: TheMars Target Encyclopedia (MTE) is a growing collection of information about surface targets identified by landers and rovers on Mars [1]. The MTE links targets to publications that provide information (e.g., composition, provenance, interpretation) about each target. Mission science team members, planetary science researchers, educators, students, and the general public can find relevant information about targets of interest or compare targets found by different missions. We use a combination of automated text analysis and manual review to populate the MTE with target information obtained from scientific publications. The MTE began with targets observed by the ChemCam instrument on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover. The MSL Analyst’s Notebook provides access to MSL target information derived from ∼6000 LPSC abstracts from 2014 to 2016 [2]. Our current goal is to extend the MTE to include targets observed in historical Mars surface missions, includingMars Pathfinder, Mars Phoenix, and the twoMars Exploration Rovers. These extensions to the MTE will enable cross-mission analyses to identify patterns in targets as well as unusual exceptions. In this abstract, we report on additions to the MTE that include targets for Pathfinder and Phoenix. We are in the process of integrating that information into the Analyst’s Notebook and for delivery to the Planetary Data System to make the content available to all. Mars Pathfinder Targets: We identified 591 abstracts from the proceedings of the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) between 1998 and 2020 that reported results related to theMars Pathfinder (MPF)mission. We found that 65 documents (11%) mentioned at least one MPF target, with 467 total target name occurrences (“mentions”). The target mentions comprise 63 distinct targets; many of them occur in multiple documents. Figure 1 shows the distribution of distinct mentions of targets within LPSC abstracts over the last 23 years of the conference. As we expect, the number of mentions is highest in the year that follows each mission’s landing and decreases over time. Some MPF targets are mentioned as late as 2013. The most commonly mentioned MPF targets are Yogi and Barnacle Bill. Note that there is no convention for formatting target names. In this abstract, we use italics to visually highlight target names, but some authors use quotation marks or (most commonly) no distinguished formatting for the target names. The MTE links targets to their mentions within doc19 98 20 00 20 02 20 04 20 06 20 08 20 10 20 12 20 14 20 16 20 18 20 20 0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200