Confirmed. NASA’s director of planetary science, Jim Green, announced at a press conference and published in the journal Nature Geoscience that there is evidence of salt water on Mars and that this liquid is responsible for the linear grooves discovered on the slopes of the craters during the hottest seasons on the red planet. In addition, this liquid water under the surface puts on the table – Martian – an environment more conducive to life.
The finding has been possible thanks to images from NASA’s MRO ( Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ) probe that have been examined with the CRISM instrument, an imaging spectrometer that allows the identification of both minerals and other compounds on the Martian surface. The results revealed evidence of hydrated salts at up to four different locations on Mars . Thus, in the so-called linear grooves (RSL, recurrent slope lines), -elong and measuring about five meters wide-, and which have been studied for years, “they are due to the activity of salt water”, the experts confirm. .
And it is that every Martian summer mysterious linear flows appear that seem to advance down the slopes in the middle latitudes of the southern hemisphere; these flows or linear furrows vanished when the cold arrived. Now, the data determine that the fact that these furrows do not remain throughout the year shows that it is a flow of liquid water that, thanks to the warmer temperatures, extends downhill through the hills and slopes. When the cold seasons come, they disappear.
Thanks to spectrometric data from CRISM, a team of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) has confirmed the presence of hydrated salts such as perchlorates and chlorates, which are very abundant on this planet (up to 10,000 times more than Earth). and that lower the freezing point of water from 0ºC to -70ºC, a circumstance by which it is possible to find liquid water.
“In general, conditions on the surface of Mars are very hostile to life (especially due to UV radiation), but these new data on the possible existence of current subsurface liquid water support (as had been hypothesized) that habitability is much more favorable under the Martian regolith , which is where future efforts will have to be concentrated in the search for life ”, explains to SINC Martínez-Frías, researcher at the Institute of Geosciences (CSIC-UCM) and scientific collaborator in several space missions in the Red planet.
