A new study from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and researchers at the California Institute of Technology question whether a long-standing theory about Mars is still valid.
In their study, the team of scientists states that a large amount of the water from the planet Mars had not escaped into space due to low gravity, as previously believed, but was instead trapped in the crust.
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While abundant water is known to have flowed over the planet billions of years ago, the team said their findings showed that between 30 and 99% of it was trapped in minerals.
Their conclusions, published in the journal Science and presented at the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, were reached using cross-mission data from the agency’s Planetary Data System (PDS).
The data covered meteorite lab work and NASA Mars Exploration Program missions, and the team focused on the amount of water on Mars over time and the chemical makeup of the planet’s current atmosphere.
In particular, they examined the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen (D / H), according to a Tuesday press release.
Although water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, not all hydrogen atoms are created equal. Called ‘heavy’ hydrogen, which has a proton and a neutron. The lighter hydrogen escapes the planet’s gravity much more easily than its denser counterpart, ”the release explained. from. “As a result, the loss of a planet’s water through the upper atmosphere would leave a revealing sign about the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the planet’s atmosphere: a very large amount of deuterium would be left behind.”
However, they say, because the loss of water through the atmosphere alone cannot be representative of both the ‘deuterium-to-hydrogen signal’ in the atmosphere and large amounts of water in the past, there are two mechanisms at play: both in minerals in the Earth’s crust. and the loss of water to the atmosphere.
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Moreover, because Mars has no tectonic plates, it cannot recycle water in the atmosphere through volcanism like Earth, making the “drying out” at the surface permanent.
“The hydrated materials on our home planet are continuously recycled through plate tectonics,” said NASA Mars Exploration Program chief scientist Michael Meyer. “Because we have measurements from multiple spacecraft, we can see that Mars does not recycle, so water is now trapped in the crust or lost in space.”
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has already found signs of water erosion on Mars rocks during its astrobiological quest.
A major purpose of the rover is to find signs of ancient microbial life during its mission by collecting and caching both rock and sediment.
Two of the lead authors of this study will help collect the samples that will be returned in early 2030 through the Mars Sample Return program.
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Meyer, who is part of the Mars Sample Return Program, told Fox News on Wednesday that they look forward to the continued analysis of their “intriguing results.”
“The history of water on Mars and its relationship to the astrobiological quest for habitability and life is one of the biggest questions we continue to study with our missions on the Red Planet,” he said. “Ultimately, this is why we hope to collect pristine samples from the Red Planet with the Mars Perseverance rover and return them safely to Earth for scientific research through the Mars Sample Return campaign.”