14 DAY TRIAL // Investigations carried out using a NASA spacecraft have revealed that environments located in the Martian underground may be suitable for sustaining future colonists on the Red Planet.
Data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) indicate that such area existed in the past, and hints that they may still be there today.
If this is true, then human space explorers will not have to carry everything they need to survive with them, but rather take shelter in caves and underground tunnels.
In a recent study, experts demonstrated that carbonate-bearing rocks indeed exist on Mars. Proving this concludes an important chapter in Mars exploration efforts, experts say.
Geologists and planetary scientists have been looking for these hydrothermally-altered rocks for many years, and infrared spectra from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument on the MRO finally revealed them.
The rocks were found in layers exposed when a space rock impacted the surface of the planet. Usually, they should have been a lot deeper, geologists explain.
“Carbonate rocks have long been a Holy Grail of Mars exploration for several reasons,” explains Planetary Science Institute expert Joseph Michalski, quoted by Space Fellowship.
The scientist says that the only way for rocks such as these ones to form here on Earth is inside lakes and oceans, which means that the same processes must have been at work on Mars as well.
The existence of an ocean of liquid water on the planet has been hypothesized for many years, and data secured by the two NASA rovers currently on Mars seem to support the idea that liquid water existed there in the distant past.
“Such deposits could indicate past seas that were once present on Mars,” Michalski goes on to say.
“Another reason is because we suspect that the ancient Martian atmosphere was probably denser and CO2-rich, but today the atmosphere is quite thin so we infer that the CO2 must have gone into carbonate rocks somewhere on Mars,” he argues.
The expert says that the rocks are also an indicator of possible hydrothermal systems, such as the ones that can be found on the bottom of Earth's oceans.
“Such an environment is chemically similar to the type of hydrothermal systems that exist within the ocean floor of Earth, which are capable of sustaining vast communities of organisms that have never seen the light of day,” he says.
Details of the new work appear in the latest issue of the top scientific journal Nature Geoscience.