Mars Spectrometry 2: Gas Chromatography
Did Mars ever have environmental conditions that could have supported life? This is one of the key questions in the field of planetary science. NASA missions like the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have a rich array of capabilities that can help answer this question, one of which is collecting rock and soil samples and taking measurements that can be used to determine their chemical makeup. These samples can be analyzed for chemical signatures that indicate the environment's habitability, or potentially even signs of microbial life directly.
The aim of this work is to build a model to automatically analyze mass spectrometry data for geological samples of scientific interest in understanding the present and past habitability of Mars. Specifically, the model should detect the presence of certain families of chemical compounds in data collected from performing gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GCMS) on a set of geological material samples.