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Scientists say cold, wet Mars possible
Source: Agencies |
May 21, 2009, Thursday
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Mars may have once been both cold and wet, researchers said yesterday, suggesting a freezing Martian landscape could still have produced water needed to sustain life.
There has been debate over the issue. Some researchers believe water likely formed many features of the planet's landscape while others point to evidence indicating early Mars had temperatures well below water's freezing point.
Using a computer model, Alberto Fairen of the NASA Ames Research Center in California and colleagues showed that both could have been possible because fluids containing dissolved minerals would have remained liquid at temperatures well below 273 degrees Kelvin - the freezing point of pure water.
"Our results are compatible with Mars lander and orbiter data and with climate modeling, and suggest a cold and wet early Mars," they wrote in the journal Nature.
The presence of water on Mars is a hot topic for scientists. They have presented strong evidence of huge deposits of frozen water at the Martian poles and point to geological features that indicate large bodies of water had flowed on the planet's surface in the distant past.
Other scientists have said images and computer simulations strongly suggest a landslide of sand and gravel are more likely explanations for the bright deposits in gullies that have been proposed as strong evidence of water flow.
Water is a key to the question of whether life, even in the form of microbes, ever existed on Mars. On Earth, all known forms of life require water.
Feiren and colleagues, including scientists from NASA's Ames Research Center in California, chose compositions based on weathered basalts for the Martian fluids in their model to match the chemical compositions of rock found at Mars landing sites.
This analysis showed a number of minerals could have lowered the melting point of water in a frozen Martian environment and help explain the early Mars climate paradox, they said.
There has been debate over the issue. Some researchers believe water likely formed many features of the planet's landscape while others point to evidence indicating early Mars had temperatures well below water's freezing point.
Using a computer model, Alberto Fairen of the NASA Ames Research Center in California and colleagues showed that both could have been possible because fluids containing dissolved minerals would have remained liquid at temperatures well below 273 degrees Kelvin - the freezing point of pure water.
"Our results are compatible with Mars lander and orbiter data and with climate modeling, and suggest a cold and wet early Mars," they wrote in the journal Nature.
The presence of water on Mars is a hot topic for scientists. They have presented strong evidence of huge deposits of frozen water at the Martian poles and point to geological features that indicate large bodies of water had flowed on the planet's surface in the distant past.
Other scientists have said images and computer simulations strongly suggest a landslide of sand and gravel are more likely explanations for the bright deposits in gullies that have been proposed as strong evidence of water flow.
Water is a key to the question of whether life, even in the form of microbes, ever existed on Mars. On Earth, all known forms of life require water.
Feiren and colleagues, including scientists from NASA's Ames Research Center in California, chose compositions based on weathered basalts for the Martian fluids in their model to match the chemical compositions of rock found at Mars landing sites.
This analysis showed a number of minerals could have lowered the melting point of water in a frozen Martian environment and help explain the early Mars climate paradox, they said.
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