Everything you need to know about NASA's new discovery

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Scientists at the research center reported the presence of liquid water on Mars. The news could mark a turning point in space exploration and the search for habitable planets.

On September 24, rumors appeared on the Internet that on Monday, September 28, NASA would announce a high-profile discovery related to the Red Planet. The rumors were confirmed, and along with the recording of the NASA press conference, Nature Geosciences published a study according to which liquid water exists on Mars.

Scientists have known about the existence of ice on Mars for a long time. Moreover, the data on the presence of water in this chemical state have already been overgrown with jokes among space explorers. Curiosity, which has been cruising the surface of Mars for three years, has also confirmed the existence of water at a certain depth.

The main question that NASA scientists asked themselves this time: does the ice ever melt? The answer to this question could confirm or refute the widespread theory that a huge ocean existed on Mars about four million years ago. Scientists have found confirmation of their assumption in strange dark streams visible in photographs of the surface of the Red Planet.

These stripes were first discovered by research ships in 2010 and were dark and narrow - about five meters wide. In the warm season, they increased in width and became longer, in the cold season, on the contrary, they decreased. This fact prompted scientists to speculate that salt water could have taken part in the creation of such strips. Moreover, the temperatures at different times of the year on Mars were consistent with the expected temperatures at which water could form such bands.

Typically, the temperature on Mars hovers around -62.2 ° C, but in the warm season near the equator, it rises to 21 ° C. This is a comfortable temperature for streams that flow down hillsides, and the presence of perchlorates in them reduces the critical freezing point. In the most severe cold, these streams turn into residual salt deposits.

The new study, published today by Nature Geosciences, provides direct evidence that liquid water does exist on Mars. Using images from the spectrometers of research ships, the scientists studied the chemical composition of the bands of the supposed salt streams. Infrared spectrometers have shown that the dark bands are actually composed of hydrated salts, with molecular water in their crystal structure.

The presence of water gives more and more grounds for the search for microbial life on Mars.

The discovered water has three possible sources:

1. Perchlorates could condense from the outside when the air on Mars is particularly humid.
2. The water could have emerged from an underground ice reservoir, which changes its state upon contact with salts.
3. The required amount of water for the formation of salt streams can provide the presence of an underground aquifer.

Be that as it may, today scientists have cited irrefutable evidence of the existence of liquid water on Mars. Water is closely related to the formation of life on Earth, and this gives confidence that extraterrestrial organisms exist somewhere nearby, in our solar system.