Reprinted with permission from World At Large, a news website covering nature, politics, science, health and travel.
Even more evidence of liquid water on Mars has been discovered by a European space probe in the form of thousands of liters of frost in the craters of Martian volcanoes.
These water frost patches were described as a “significant” first by the international astronomy team after they were identified on the volcanoes of the Tharsis region.
They say that their discovery, described in the magazine Natural Geoscienceschallenges previous assumptions about the climate on Mars and is a major breakthrough in the search for life forms on other planets.
A separate discovery by another probe has revealed another volcanic feature of Mars as a potential gold mine of knowledge about the planet. A series of mysterious holes about 3 meters wide, recently re-examined, are believed to be skylights where Martian regolith collapsed into a lava tube.
The images were made by the University. of Arizona’s High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, in 2022, but when one of them showed up in an image of the day, it fueled speculation about the origins of the mysterious holes found in the Arsia Mons volcano – also in the Tharsis region.
Frost to frost
During the cold seasons, 150,000 tons of water exchange between the surface of Olympus Mons and the atmosphere every day – the equivalent of about 60 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
This is possible because Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system, is three times as high as Mount Everest, and is as wide as France from lee to windward.
Discovered by the Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) aboard the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter, the research suggests the frost is only present for a few hours after sunrise before evaporating in sunlight.
“We thought it was unlikely that frost would form around Mars’ equator because the mix of sunshine and a thin atmosphere keeps temperatures relatively high during the day, both on the surface and on the mountain top – unlike what we see on Earth where you would expect to see icy peaks,” says study leader Dr. Adomas Valantinas of Brown University, Rhode Island.
“What we’re seeing could be a remnant of an ancient climate cycle on modern Mars, where in the past you had precipitation and maybe even snowfall on these volcanoes.”
The research team proposes that the way the air circulates above these mountains creates a ‘unique’ microclimate that allows the thin patches of ice to form in very thin layers, about the width of a human hair.
They believe that modeling how the frost forms could allow scientists to reveal more of Mars’s remaining secrets, including insight into where water exists and how it moves, as well as insight into the planet’s complex atmospheric dynamics, which is essential for future exploration and the search for possible signs of life.
To that end, Dr. Valantinas now plans to look at ancient hydrothermal environments that could have supported microbial life on Mars.
Mole Martians
These holes discovered by the HiRISE camera are believed to be the result of the soil eroding into a lava tube below.
Underground lava tubes are strange places on Earth, but on Mars they could provide a ready-made shelter from radiation that astronauts could potentially use on future missions during solar storms.
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‘There’s more than one [pits] on Mars that we’ve seen,” said Brandon Johnson, a geophysicist at Purdue University Business insider. “But they are really interesting because they are places where astronauts can go and are safe from radiation.”
Because of this hiding place, they can also be a promising place to look for signs of microbial life. In the absence of any significant or total magnetosphere, the barrier that protects life on Earth from solar radiation, the bosom of Mars’ interior would be the only available source of natural protection.
While the surface of Mars can reach temperatures of minus 80 to minus 160 degrees Fahrenheit, life forms that live underground can avoid freezing to death. On Earth, the underground environment is basically always 63°F no matter where you go in the world.
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On Mars, Johnson explains that it is not known what the subsurface temperature would be, but it is not difficult to imagine something similar.
Proposals are forming to send a specialized rover to Mars and drop it into these skylights with the aim of studying the environment therein. Although the rovers have so far been limited in their scope to wheeled vehicles, tests are currently underway with serpentine rovers that ‘spiral’ rather than roll across the ground; allowing them to travel up and down walls, over the most uneven terrain and even on ice. They were designed primarily for a hypothetical expedition to Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, but there’s no reason why snake probes couldn’t be used to explore lava tubes on Mars; it would probably be an easier place to start anyway. WaL
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