We continually receive extraordinary news about Mars, the red planet. News related to its planetary evolution, its volcanoes, its minerals and rocks; its atmosphere, the multiple evidences on the existence of water and on whether there could be microbial life , or if there could even be it today.
Programs related to future manned missions have recently been launched that seriously evaluate the still remote possibility of reaching the planet. But how is Mars studied? How is it possible that we can obtain so many scientific results on such diverse questions and evaluate them properly?
Well, first of all, it must be explained that studies on planetary sciences are characterized by their interdisciplinarity, and that is how they must be approached and understood. That said, several “main sources of information” can be specified, through which we learn about Mars, its past and its present, from different perspectives and at different scales:
– Observations and astronomical and astrophysical studies through telescopes.
– Monitoring and investigations by sending missions that include orbiters, landers and rovers .
– Study of the different types of Martian meteorites.
– Use of simulation cameras of planetary environments that allow us to investigate surface processes, combining different types of variables (pressure, temperature, UV radiation, composition of the atmosphere, etc.)
– Study of the so-called analogues of Mars : areas with special characteristics due to their geology, mineralogy, climatology, geochemistry or even microbiology, which help us understand different extreme environments, test prototypes and new instruments that, later, will be part of the missions and to develop new scientific models. All this, extrapolated later to the study of the present and the past of Mars.
The participation of Spain in the studies on Mars
In Spain we have been working on research that covers all these aspects and among which it is worth highlighting our participation in several missions to Mars, such as the currently active Curiosity rover: NASA-MSL (Mars Science Laboratory ) mission or future ESA-ExoMars and NASA-Mars2020 .
It is also very important to take into account the importance of our country, thanks to its geodiversity , in the identification and characterization of certain areas of the Earth as analogues of Mars. Río Tinto, Jaroso, Canarias, Campos de Calatrava or the Gulf of Cádiz have deserved international recognition and are being key pieces in numerous top-level geological and astrobiological studies on the red planet.
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
Jesús Martínez-Frías (@J_MartinezFrias) is a Researcher at the Institute of Geosciences, IGEO (CSIC-UCM), Director of the Spanish Network of Planetology and Astrobiology (REDESPA) and Member of the NASA-MSL, ESA-ExoMars and NASA-Mars missions -2020
