Mars tagged posts

Hubble Space Telescope photo of Mars taken when the planet was 50 million miles from Earth on May 12, 2016.
Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (ASU), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute)

Model describing conditions under which oxygenated water could exist on Mars challenges traditional beliefs about planet’s habitability. A team led by scientists at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA, has calculated that if liquid water exists on Mars, it could – under specific conditions – contain more oxygen than previously thought possible. According to the model, the levels could even theoretically exceed the threshold needed to support simple aerobic life.

That finding runs contrary to the current, accepted view of Mars and i...

The central portion of Osuga Valles, which has a total length of 164 km. In some places, it is 20 km wide and plunges to a depth of 900 m. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The valley networks of Mars bear a strong resemblance to those found in arid landscapes on Earth. Researchers have been able to demonstrate this using the branching angles of river valley confluences. Based on these observations, they infer that Mars once had a primeval climate in which sporadic heavy precipitation eroded valleys. The surface of Mars bears imprints of structures that resemble fluvial steam networks on Earth.

Scientists therefore assume that there must have been once enough water on the red planet to feed water streams that incised their path into the soil...

Mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

By studying a stream on the UK coast, experts have calculated how much organic matter we might find on Mars, and where to look. Imperial College London scientists have found traces of fatty acids – key building blocks of biological cells – in Dorset’s acidic streams. They say that because of the similarity of acidic streams in Dorset and on Mars, their findings hint that life might once have existed on Mars.

By applying their findings to the Red Planet, they concluded that there could be nearly 12,000 Olympic sized pools of organic matter on Mars that could represent traces of past life. Dorset is home to highly acidic sulphur streams that host bacteria which thrive in extreme conditions...

Martin Schiller et al. Isotopic evolution of the protoplanetary disk and the building blocks of Earth and the Moon, Nature (2018). DOI: 10.1038/nature25990

A team of researchers with the University of Copenhagen and the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions has come up with a new explanation regarding the difference in composition of the planets in our solar system. In their paper published in the journal Nature, they describe their study of the calcium-isotope composition of certain meteorites, Earth itself, and Mars, and use what they learned to explain how the planets could be so different. Alessandro Morbidelli with Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France offers a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.

As Morbidelli notes, most p...