Extrapolation of EMMA to the Moon and Mars

Abstract

In this section, EMMA is first extrapolated to the Moon, to hopefully get new clues about a confusing problem that people have failed to figure out since 1970. It deals with the so-called meteoritic contamination of the lunar crust in siderophile elements such as iridium, which was previously attributed to the crater-forming impactors and not to micrometeorites. We next move to Mars to try to check whether EMMA can account for the high sulfur and nickel contents of Martian soils measured with instruments carried by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity in 2004. Before 1999, this obscure contamination looked at first glance to be of a limited interest. Consequently, it was neglected in earlier works. We discovered recently that the true reason for this neglect was probably that the description of this contamination on the Moon and Mars requires facing an astonishing diversity of very dificult problems in planetology, in which we became bogged down. But it was too late to quit.