Mars
Photo Credit: NASA
Washington, Jan 27: Data gleaned from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter has revealed that the Red Planet might hold large underground reservoirs of water and carbon dioxide that once formed the planet's ancient atmosphere.
Stas Barabash and colleagues from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics who studied the data said, of the water and carbon dioxide that once existed on the planet, only a small amount was likely lost to the effects of solar wind over the past 3.5 billion years.
Solar wind is the flow of charged particles that flows briskly from the Sun.
As such, water and carbon dioxide reservoirs might still exist on or below the Martian surface, the research team wrote in their study in the journal Science.
Further research into the planet's subsurface and atmosphere could reveal critical information about Mars' climate, they said.
"Knowing more (about the ancient Martian climate), we could speculate whether or not conditions were suitable for any complex structures (like organic materials) to develop. The question is thus directly related to the question of Mars' habitability. The origin of life, in my opinion, is the most important question the modern science is facing," National Geographic quoted Barabash as saying.
According to him, ancient Mars was much warmer, and wetter, than what it is today.
Geological features indicate that large amounts of liquid water once existed on Mars, yet no one knows what became of them, he said.
While some theories suggest that water and carbon dioxide still exist on Mars in large reservoirs that are as yet unfound, probably below the planet's surface, others propose that some catastrophic cosmic impact removed much of the Martian atmosphere in a single event.
A third postulation is that solar winds removed Martian water and carbon dioxide.
"I'm a plasma physicist so I really like the last one. But our last study shows that escape (of water and carbon dioxide) from this channel is not as intense as we thought before, and that's a very big puzzle," said Barabash, a professor of experimental space physics.
"Recent measurements both from Mars Express and from Mars Global Surveyor suggest that we have not yet even described all of the loss processes at the present epoch," said Bruce Jakosky, from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado.
"This means that we cannot yet determine the total loss rate today, let alone be able to extrapolate to earlier epochs," he added.
According to Prof. Barabash, solar wind may function in ways that scientists can't yet measure.
"It's possible that solar wind is far more complex than we think. So we have to explore other escape channels which are also associated with the solar wind," he said. (ANI)