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The climate of Mars may have been different than previously thought. A new study offers surprising results.
Reno – It's so dry it looks red – that's why many people think of Mars as a warm planet. But far from it: Mars is actually ice cold, with temperatures ranging from a freezing -150 degrees Celsius to just 20 degrees Celsius. It's unclear whether this has always been the case or if the Red Planet once had a different climate. What is certain is that there was liquid water on Mars at one time, as dried-up lakes and river beds suggest, and Mars rovers have also found numerous signs of water.
For liquid water to be possible, the temperature must be above freezing. But does that automatically mean Mars was once warm? A new study shows: Not necessarily. A team of scientists led by the Desert Research Institute in Nevada collected material for study from three different regions on Earth: Newfoundland, northern California, and western Nevada. These samples were compared to material collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover in Gale Crater on Mars. The study’s findings were: In the specialized magazine Earth and Environment Communications Published.
NASA Rover Examines Materials on Mars
Anthony Feldman, one of the study's authors, poses the obvious question: “Gale Crater is a former lake basin — there was clearly water present,” he adds. “But what were the environmental conditions when the water was present?” notice “We’ll never find a direct equivalent on Mars because the conditions on Mars and on Earth are so different,” he added. “But we can look at trends in terrestrial conditions and use them to try to translate them to Mars questions.”
The material Curiosity discovered on Mars is known as “X-ray amorphous material.” It lacks the typical, repeating atomic structure characteristic of minerals, making it difficult to characterize using traditional techniques like X-ray diffraction. “You can think of X-ray amorphous material like Jell-O,” Feldman explains. “It’s a soup of different elements and chemicals sliding on top of each other.”
Martian materials are chemically similar to those found in Newfoundland.
Martian materials are rich in iron and silicon dioxide but poor in aluminum. The exact composition and what it says about the Red Planet’s past are still unclear. So the research team looked for similar materials on Earth and found them in the subarctic conditions of Newfoundland, where they showed a chemically similar material to the Martian material. However, soils in the warmer climates of California and Nevada were not comparable.
“This shows that you need water to form these materials,” Feldman concludes. “But cold conditions must be present, with average annual temperatures close to freezing, to maintain amorphous materials in the soil. Amorphous materials are often thought of as relatively unstable—the atoms have not yet decomposed at the atomic level that they were introduced into.” Their final crystalline form. “We think that the very cold, subfreezing conditions are a special kinetic limiting factor that enables these materials to form and be maintained,” the researcher explains.
It must have been relatively cold on Mars.
At least in Gale Crater on Mars, where the material comes from, the atmosphere must have been cold enough for a long period of time for the material to form. “This study improves our understanding of the climate on Mars,” Feldman said. “The results suggest that the abundance of this material in Gale Crater is consistent with subarctic conditions, similar to those found in Iceland, for example.” (unpaid invoice)
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