Ibn Battuta Centre

Scientific Contact:

Local administrative contact (once a TNA visit is awarded):

The Ibn Battuta Centre near Marrakech in Morocco is a desert field facility. This extreme environmentis used to test rover, landing systems, instruments dedicated to the Mars exploration and to perform scientificanalysis of Mars analogues. Desert environments in the region provide a wide variety of field analoguesincluding sand dunes, rocky desert, regoliths, evaporates and other environments and geological andgeomorphological features such as flash flood drainage. Science activities can be performed both in ancientgeological units and modern environments. On going geological analysis of the region aims to quantitatively understand the origin of environments such as mud volcanoes, evaporitic deposits, the recent stratigraphy of aeolian sediments and deflation surfaces that appear remarkable comparable to those reported from Mars.

Astrobiology research is also examining potential habitats and energy sources within ancient mud volcanoes and evaporates with the goal of establishing how specific endolithic communities and arid bacterial nichesfunction. The Centre is currently devoted to fundamental science research and instrument development andtesting related to the Mars exploration. Projects are specifically related to ESA missions Mars Express,ExoMars, Mars-Next, Mars Sample Return. However, the Ibn Battuta Centre also has the potential to be usedfor researchers on other missions, for example those interested in the aeolian deposits observed on Titan.

Access to the site is provided through the International Research School of Planetary Science (IRSPS) within the faculty of Sciences at the Universita' d'Annunzio Italy which has been working at he site for many years.