A Ph.D. student at the University of Sydney has produced the first comprehensive classification system and map of Martian soils, creating a new framework that could help scientists compare landscapes across the Red Planet and identify promising locations for future exploration, habitation and food production.

The research, led by Daniel Irving from the Sydney Institute of Agriculture and the Faculty of Science, proposes a new term for Martian soil classes: “areths,” derived from Ares, the Greek name for Mars.

Published in the journal CATENA, the research uses orbital observations and models to classify almost 800 million locations across Mars into a hierarchy of 2,000 soil classes and presents a global map showing where they occur.