The question of whether Mars ever supported life has captivated the imagination of scientists and the public for decades.
Central to the discovery is gaining insight into the past climate of Earth's neighbor: was the planet warm and wet, with seas and rivers much like those found on our own planet? Or was it frigid and icy, and therefore potentially less prone to supporting life as we know it? A new study finds evidence to support the latter by identifying similarities between soils found on Mars and those of Canada's Newfoundland, a cold subarctic climate.
NASA's Curiosity Rover has been investigating Gale Crater since 2011, and has found a plethora of soil materials known as"X-ray amorphous material." These components of the soil lack the typical repeating atomic structure that defines minerals, and therefore can't be easily characterized using traditional techniques like X-ray diffraction.
Feldman and his colleagues visited three locations in search of similar X-ray amorphous material: the Tablelands of Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland, Northern California's Klamath Mountains, and western Nevada. These three sites had serpentine soils that the researchers expected to be chemically similar to the X-ray amorphous material at Gale Crater: rich in iron and silicon but lacking in aluminum.
Amorphous material is often considered to be relatively unstable, meaning that at an atomic level, the atoms haven't yet organized into their final, more crystalline forms."There's something going on in the kinetics -- or the rate of reaction -- that is slowing it down so that these materials can be preserved over geologic time scales," Feldman says.
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The speed of sound on Mars is constantly changing, study findsDeepa Jain is a freelance science writer from Bengaluru, India. Her educational background consists of a master's degree in biology from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and an almost-completed bachelor's degree in archaeology from the University of Leicester, UK. She enjoys writing about astronomy, the natural world and archaeology.
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The speed of sound on Mars is constantly changing, bizarre study findsDeepa Jain is a freelance science writer from Bengaluru, India. Her educational background consists of a master's degree in biology from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and an almost-completed bachelor's degree in archaeology from the University of Leicester, UK. She enjoys writing about astronomy, the natural world and archaeology.
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