Scientists studying data from China’s Zhurong rover have for the first time discovered cracked layers in small Martian dunes, suggesting that the Red Planet was a salt-rich watery world as recently as 400,000 years ago.
Since landing In the northern hemisphere of Mars in May 2021, the rover has drifted close to four adjacent crescents. dunes in the Utopia Planitia region to study their surface composition. All four miniature, wind-formed geologic features are covered by thin, ubiquitous rifted crusts and ridges that formed as a result of melting small pockets of “modern water” between 1.4 million and 400,000 years ago. new paper (opens in a new tab) published on Friday (April 28).
“This means a more recent time in the history of Mars,” Xiaoguang Qing, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and author of the new study, told Space.com.
Related: Water on Mars: Exploration and Evidence
Scientists have long thought that early Mars about three billion years ago there was abundant liquid water. But dramatic climate change froze much of it, with the ice now locked in poles and leaving most of the planet.
The studied dunes Zhurong, located near its landing site in the planet’s northern hemisphere — far from the North Pole — are only 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 meters) long and about 1 meter tall. The latest findings by analyzing the images and data sent home by Zhurong and Tianwen 1 orbiter companion shows that a significant amount of water from the planet’s icy polar regions flowed to lower latitudes a few million years ago, settling on the dunes of Utopia Planitia.
As Jurong approached his target dunes, which are pint-sized compared to the large two-story dunes, NASA’s Curiosity rover studied elsewhere on Mars, the Laser Induced Decomposition Spectrometer (MarSCoDe) on the rover shattered grains of sand into millimeter-sized particles. Their chemical composition revealed hydrated minerals such as sulfates, silica, iron oxide, and chlorides. According to the research team, these minerals formed in the presence of water at low latitudes during the late Amazonian period on Mars, which scientists previously thought was dry bone.
Researchers say water vapor traveled from the Martian poles to lower latitudes, such as the Jurong site, when the planet’s polar ice caps released large amounts of water vapor due to a different tilt at the Martian poles, researchers say. facing more directly towards the sun. Ice temperatures on the wobbly planet condensed the drifting vapor and dumped it as snow far from the poles, according to a new study.
The tilt of Mars changes on a 124,000-year cycle, so “it offers a mechanism to replenish vapor in the atmosphere, forming frost or snow at the low latitudes where the Zhurong rover landed,” Qing told Space.com. But “no water ice was detected by any instrument on the Zhurong rover.”
Instead, just as salty roads on Earth melt patches of ice during storms, salts in Martian sand dunes warmed the fallen snow and thawed it enough to form salt water. The process also formed minerals such as silica and iron oxides that Jurong spotted, the researchers say.
However, the salt water did not last long. Temperature on Mars swing wildly and spike in the mornings between 5 and 6 a.m., so the salt water evaporated and left behind salt and other newly formed minerals that later seep between the dune’s sand grains, cementing them to form a crust, the study shows.
The crust that formed over the dunes, which is only 0.5 inches (1.25 centimeters) to 1.7 cm (3 inches) deep, likely materialized within a year because the loose dunes would not have survived long enough to harden over. millennium. It then cracked because the high temperature dehydrated it so much that they “should be hard and able to withstand wind erosion,” Qing said.
“The phenomenon was documented at one location, but it should be applicable to a fairly large portion of the Martian surface at similar latitudes,” said Manasvi Lingam, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the Florida Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new study. research, told Space.com.
Since Zhurong, which is now suffocating under dust covered solar panelsdiscovered water activity in and within Martian salt dunes, the researchers of the new study are proposing future missions to search for salt-tolerant microbes, perhaps such as brine shrimp or the sorrel that lives in Utah’s Great Salt Lake in the United States.
This study is described in a paper (opens in a new tab) published Friday (April 28) in the journal Science Advances.
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