Pathfinder landing sites at candidate SNC impact ejection sites
If Mars Pathfinder were able to land at a site on Mars from which the SNC meteorites were ejected by impact, the Pathfinder mission would essentially represent a very inexpensive sample return mission. Geologic units that contain four potential impact craters from which SNC meteorites could have been ejected from Mars are accessible to the Mars Pathfinder lander. Determining that SNC meteorites came from a particular spot on Mars raises the intriguing possibility of using Pathfinder as a sample return mission and providing a radiometric age for the considerably uncertain martian crater-age timescale. Pathfinder instruments are capable of determining if the rock type at the landing site is similar to that of one or more of the SNC meteorites, which would strengthen the hypothesis that the SNC meteorites did, in fact, come from Mars. Unfortunately, instrument observations from Pathfinder are probably not capable of determining if the geologic unit sampled by the lander is definitively the unit from which a SNC meteorite came from as opposed to Mars in general or perhaps a particular region on Mars. This abstract evaluates the possibility of landing at potential SNC ejection sites and the ability of Pathfinder to identify the landing site as the place from which an SNC meteorite came.