Mars May Hold Ore Deposits Rich Enough to Mine, Decades of Sample Data Suggest

For more than half a century, plans for living off the land on Mars have revolved around a remarkably short shopping list: pull carbon dioxide from the thin atmosphere, dig up water ice or bake it out of hydrated minerals, and turn those feedstocks into oxygen, methane and hydrogen for breathing and for rocket propellant. A new comprehensive analysis argues that this volatile-centric view is far too narrow for the ambitions now taking shape, from commercial settlement concepts to long-duration crewed missions, and that the Red Planet’s non-volatile mineral resources deserve the same rigorous, sample-based scrutiny that water and atmosphere have received.

The study, published as the inaugural article in the journal Space and Planetary Resources, was conducted by Kevin M. Cannon of Ethos Space Corp. and the Colorado School of Mines. Drawing on decades of laboratory analyses of nearly 400 martian meteorites and on in-situ measurements from the Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Perseverance and Zhurong rovers, Cannon compiled the highest reported concentrations of 83 naturally occurring elements on Mars and compared them with the grades of ore deposits mined on Earth. The work arrives, he argues, at an inflection point between what may be the last large robotic science missions to Mars and the first serious steps toward commercialization and human landings.

A central theme of the analysis is that past discussions of planetary resources have often stumbled into logical errors that the terrestrial mining industry abandoned long ago. The most common is the presence-versus-absence fallacy: asking whether an element exists on Mars at all, when modern mass spectrometers can detect parts per trillion in virtually any material. What matters, Cannon stresses, is concentration, or grade, in a specific raw material at a specific location, because the energy and cost of extraction rise exponentially as grade falls. A gold mining company does not care how much gold is in Earth’s crust; it cares about the grade of a particular deposit. Similarly, the speciation of an element into separable ore minerals, such as zircon or monazite, versus lattice-bound substitutions in silicates, can make the difference between a practical resource and an impractical one.

The comparison baseline matters too. Average crustal composition is the wrong yardstick; martian concentrations must be measured against actual terrestrial ore bodies, which are enriched many orders of magnitude above bulk crust. When that comparison is made, the results span more than five orders of magnitude, with a median ratio of 27, meaning terrestrial ores are on average 27 times richer than the best-known martian materials. Six elements, including oxygen, sulfur, germanium, rubidium, argon and xenon, match or exceed the concentrations of the materials they are extracted from on Earth. Volatile elements such as sulfur, chlorine and bromine sit close to terrestrial ore grades, consistent with Mars having accreted from more volatile-rich building blocks. By contrast, the light metals lithium, beryllium and boron, the platinum group elements, the light rare earths, and the nuclear fuels thorium and uranium are orders of magnitude depleted in known martian samples.

Perhaps the most striking conclusions concern specific deposit types that rovers may have already brushed against. In Gale crater, ChemCam on the Curiosity rover detected copper enrichments throughout the stratigraphy of Mount Sharp, with the highest values in the Kimberley Formation. Detailed analysis suggests the copper occurs both in detrital grains of the potassic sandstones and adsorbed on manganese oxide coatings, pointing toward a porphyry copper or impact-hydrothermal deposit somewhere in the sediment source region. That would be a remarkable finding, because earlier theoretical work had specifically predicted that porphyry copper deposits should not exist on Mars, a prediction made before the discovery of evolved, potassic igneous lithologies and the full extent of ancient water-rock interaction on the planet.

At Jezero crater, the Perseverance rover has found strongly correlated nickel and copper enrichments in highly altered, aluminum-rich float rocks, with ore-grade values that support the long-standing prediction of Ni-Cu-PGE sulfide deposits associated with ultramafic volcanism. The region’s extensive olivine-rich unit, mapped from orbit and confirmed on the ground by an olivine cumulate outcrop on the crater floor, fits the terrestrial analog of large igneous provinces where such sulfide ores segregate from lava flows. Perseverance’s PIXL instrument has also detected lamellar bands of zirconium, titanium, chromium and phosphorus-bearing dense grains in deltaic sediments, evidence for heavy mineral lag deposits of the kind mined on Earth for ilmenite and zircon. Cannon notes that in all three cases the enriched materials were transported by water away from their sources, leaving only shadows of the original ore bodies, much as the California gold rush began in creek beds before prospectors traced the gold back to hard rock.

The quantitative picture is sharpened by extrapolation from element-element correlations in the meteorite collection. A single SuperCam point at Jezero reporting up to 2000 parts per million copper, if taken at face value, would predict roughly 2.2 parts per million ruthenium based on the meteorite correlation, exceeding typical terrestrial platinum-group ore grades even though the value falls below rover detection limits. Similarly, a PIXL spot measuring 1.4 weight percent zirconium, attributed to zircon or baddeleyite, implies about 362 parts per million hafnium, slightly above terrestrial ore values. These calculations suggest that ore-quality enrichments may already have been encountered on rover traverses, hidden below the sensitivity of onboard instruments, and that only a tiny fraction of the martian surface has been examined at all.

Mapping the indicators globally reveals a crucial geographic pattern. Olivine detections, potassium- and thorium-rich alkali terrains, aluminum clay exposures and fan-shaped sedimentary landforms, the best orbital proxies for sulfide, porphyry-like, leached and placer deposits respectively, cluster largely in equatorial regions such as Nili Fossae, Mawrth Vallis and eastern Valles Marineris. The mid-latitudes, where shallow ground ice is abundant, show a notable absence of these indicators, partly because younger lava flows, plains deposits and ice-dust mantles bury the ancient Noachian units where ores are most likely. This creates a potential tradeoff for settlement planning: if water is mined from ground ice, prospecting for metals may be pushed to marginal zones, but if water comes from hydrated minerals or other equatorial sources, the richest known mineral provinces become accessible. Atmospheric carbon dioxide and iron, available everywhere from regolith and iron meteorites, impose no such constraint.

Volumetrics remain a major uncertainty. The hematite-bearing unit at Meridiani Planum covers some 150,000 square kilometers, though its thickness is poorly known, while a native sulfur deposit recently discovered by Curiosity in Gediz Vallis has an estimated volume of 28,000 to 50,000 cubic meters. For the copper and nickel-copper signals at Gale and Jezero, the source deposits, if intact, likely exceed the transported materials in which they were detected, but elements like copper and nickel cannot yet be mapped from orbit. Cannon also flags unexplored geologic settings as prime targets for human fieldwork: evolved dacite terrains in Syrtis Major and the Eridania basin, impact-induced and magma-ice hydrothermal systems, speculative ancient seafloor deposits, and deeply leached aluminum clay stratigraphies like those at Mawrth Vallis, where extreme alteration hinted at by Jezero’s float rocks may have concentrated additional elements.

The bottom line is a sober but encouraging assessment. Mars falls between the Moon and Earth in its ore grades, as expected for a planet with intermediate geologic activity and water-rock interaction. Basic structural and industrial metals, including iron, aluminum, manganese, chromium, copper, zinc and titanium, show promising enrichments detectable with current orbital and geomorphologic data and should be prioritized for an initial settlement, while elements like lead, uranium and antimony are so depleted that substitution or import will likely remain necessary. As robotic exploration winds down and human missions approach, the study argues that the periodic table, not just the water cycle, must become the framework for choosing where on Mars to go and what to build when we get there.

Subject of Research: Assessment of non-volatile mineral and ore resources on Mars using meteorite and rover sample data

Article Title: Mineral resources of Mars based on decades of sample analysis

Article References: Cannon, K. M. (2025). Mineral resources of Mars based on decades of sample analysis. Space and Planetary Resources, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44461-025-00001-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44461-025-00001-8

Keywords: Mars, mineral resources, ore deposits, in-situ resource utilization, martian meteorites, Gale crater, Jezero crater, porphyry copper, Ni-Cu-PGE sulfides, heavy mineral sands, Perseverance rover, Curiosity rover