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Mars, the Wet Planet?

OK, scientists in all probability will not be going to hold that deal with on the fourth rock from the solar and the second-smallest planet within the Solar System now. But if they’d been round 3.5 billion years in the past, they could have thought-about it.

Information collected by the NASA Mars rover Curiosity exhibits that the planet was as soon as a a lot wetter place than it’s now. Analysis of the Glen Torridon area within the Gale crater, created by a meteor influence on Mars 3.7 billion years in the past, point out that bedrock there was altered by groundwater.

“There is a block of evidence that when the crater was formed, Earth and Mars were similar in water and atmosphere,” stated Patrick Gasda of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Space and Remote Sensing Group. “Mars underwent a climate change. All signs point to a warm, wet Mars in the past. Now Mars is cold and dry. What made Mars divert from Earth? If we could figure that out, maybe we could prevent that here.”

Crater lakes, sizzling rocks

Curiosity’s project was to find if Mars ever had the fitting environmental situations to assist small life varieties known as microbes. The rover acquires rock, soil and air samples for onboard evaluation. It seems for rocks that shaped in water and/or present indicators of organics.

Gasda, 37, is the lead writer of a research, revealed just lately in a particular subject of Journal of Geophysical Research Planets, that describes what Curiosity present in probably the most chemically diversified a part of Gale crater, which is 96 miles large and incorporates a 3-mile-high mountain of layered sediments named Mount Sharp.

“Gale crater had a lake approximately 3.5 billion years ago,” Gasda stated. “There could have been a deep lake there, or maybe just a few small or shallow lakes with small rivers in between. It would have been a friendly place for life – like bacterial life. But we haven’t found any evidence of life yet.”

He stated the crater’s Glen Torridon area doubtless represents the final levels of a moist Mars.

“And we want to understand the lake sediments in order to give us a baseline for what happened right before Mars’ climate changed,” Gasda stated.

Scientists imagine the lake in Gale crater was shaped by groundwater seeping in and rivers, fed by rain and melting snow, flowing in. Gravel, sand and silt got here in with the river water.

Over hundreds of thousands of years these sediments continued to construct up within the crater. Even after Mars began drying out and rivers ceased to circulation, wind blew sand and dirt into the crater, probably filling it to the brim. But then the winds start to claw away on the bowl of sediment, till what stays in the present day is Mount Sharp.

“Erosion by wind could have taken about a billion years,” Gasda stated. “The base (of Mount Sharp) takes up between a third and two-thirds of the crater. It’s big. It’s been compared to (Tanzania’s) Mount Kilimanjaro.”

Each layer of sediment locked into the rock information a chapter that reveals the atmosphere that created it. Curiosity, utilizing its ChemCam instrument, which was developed at Los Alamos and a French area laboratory, reads these chapters and reviews again to Earth.

ChemCam registers chemistry and imagery from Curiosity’s 4 cameras to search for bodily and chemical adjustments to rocks.

“We see rounded nodules that have different color – darker toned – than the surrounding material,” Gasda stated. “Water in a crater will react with rocks if there for a long time. It is the darker material that gets concentrations of water. That’s how we know this stuff formed in water.”

Curiosity additionally found giant veins with peculiar chemistry, together with excessive iron and manganese darkish veins and fluorine-rich lighter veins.

“We did not expect to find veins with chemistry like this in Glen Torridon,” Gasda stated. “Our hypothesis for the way these things formed is that the initial (meteor) impact heated rocks near the crater, groundwater flowed through those rocks and this hot water likely extracted elements such as fluorine from these rocks.”

Heated water, or hydrothermal, techniques would deliver parts resembling iron, nickel, sulfur and manganese to the floor of Mars, and microbes use these parts as a supply of power.

“We think now things like this happened all over Mars,” Gasda stated. “Any time a large impact occurs, you would have hot water circulating. It is possible all craters on Mars had similar circumstances. Mars could have been friendly to life planet wide.”

What’s life?

Gasda has a bachelor’s diploma in chemistry from Ursinus College in Pennsylvania and a doctorate in geology from the University of Hawaii.

“I’ve been interested in all things related to space and rocks since I was a kid, but I went to college to do chemistry,” he stated. “I worked in industry for a while but didn’t like it. Eventually I came back to what I really wanted to do, which was geology and planetary science, in graduate school.”

A child-like enthusiasm continues to be evident when he talks about exploring Mars. He thinks it’s loopy thrilling that we’re touchdown rovers on a planet that’s farther away from Earth than Earth is from the solar.

Curiosity was launched in November 2011 and landed on Mars in August 2012.

“Curiosity had its own camera and took pictures on the way down,” Gasda stated. “It looked for places that were flat so it would have a good place to land.”

Initially, Curiosity’s mission was set at two years. But two years got here and handed practically eight years in the past and the rover retains on trucking.

The rover’s objective was to find the position of water on Mars and whether or not or not the planet may have supported life. So far, so good.

“Water was there and it would have been nice if there was life,” Gasda stated. “We just don’t have a way of measuring that.”

He stated that maybe the rover Perseverance, which landed on Mars in February 2021, would possibly discover a fossil that might show life as soon as existed on the planet.

He’s not speaking about one thing like Brontosaurus bones.

“The most realistic would be fossils of bacteria, tiny little specks,” he stated. “You could look for concentrations of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, which are required for life as we know it.”

But what if there’s life as we don’t realize it.

“As far as we know, only Earth has life on it,” Gasda stated. “But we don’t know sufficient about life to make certain. We have just one instance of a biosphere. If we may discover one other instance of life, we may perceive life extra broadly.

“If we are the only ones here, we should do a better job of protecting this life.”

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