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Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Mission discovers Mars was 'habitable' - Mars used to be 'Soaking Wet'
The most recent data from the Mars rover Opportunity indicates that the section of the Red Planet it is studying was once soaking wet, NASA scientists announced yesterday. "We've been able to read the tell-tale clues the water left behind, giving us confidence in that conclusion," says principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University.
Since its January 24th landing in a small crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars, Opportunity has been exploring its surroundings, particularly a rock outcrop on the inner slope of the crater. As the robot collected more information on the bedrock, the planet’s watery history became clear, the NASA group says. "Liquid water once flowed through these rocks. It changed their texture, and it changed their chemistry," Squyres asserts.
According to the team, four lines of evidence point to the existence of liquid water.
1. First, small spherical objects embedded in the rock are similar to so-called concretions, which form when minerals precipitate out of water.
2. Second, close-up shots reveal irregularly-shaped holes at various angles in the rock, the imprints of crystals formed by water.
3. Third, spectrometry analyses indicate that the rock contains enormous quantities of sulfur, which the researchers attribute to it being awash in sulfate salts, a telltale sign of liquid water.
4. Finally, a second spectrometer detected the mineral jarosite, an iron-sulfate hydrate, in the outcrop. This mineral is found on Earth, though rarely, and is only made in the presence of water. "We believe at this place on Mars, for some point in time, this was a habitable environment," Squyres remarks. "This is the kind of place that would have been suitable for life. That doesn’t mean life was there, we don’t know that."
Indeed, plenty of questions about Martian water remain. Although the researchers are confident that liquid water flowed over or through the rocks, they do not yet know whether the rocks were laid down in liquid water. More detailed pictures taken in the days to come could help resolve this unknown, however. In addition, the age of the rocks Opportunity is studying cannot be determined, because the most effective methods for dating require samples to be returned to a laboratory on Earth.
Scientists declared new evidence on Tuesday that life-sustaining water once pooled around an ancient Martian rock formation, which is now under scrutiny by one of the twin NASA robotic rovers.
"We believe at this place on Mars, for some period in time, it was a habitable environment. This was the kind of place that would have been suitable for life," said Cornell University astronomer Steve Squyres, who serves as the principal investigator for NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rover missions.
Theorists believe the water that once flowed on Mars disappeared from the surface in response to unexplained climate changes. Some of the moisture evaporated into the thin atmosphere of Mars, but much of it may have remained underground, where it is frozen among the subsoil or ponded in vast subterranean reservoirs.
"It's quite an amazing development they've got there," said Allan Treiman, a planetary geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
"What they have ... is chemical evidence that the idea is actually true," Treiman said. "I guess you would have to say that when you put it all together, it increases the likelihood you would find life there. But I don't know if we've got a big or a little increase there."
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