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The conditions on Mars do not forgive. Just ask the Opportunity rover. Oh, you can not. It was forced into a drastic hibernation by deadly dust storms so intense that they engulfed the entire planet.
During the shutdown of the intrepid explorer, scientists announce the discovery of something astonishing: a massive water lake hidden under the Martian ice. But across the surface, everything is dirty, dry and covered with layers of this endless dust – and now we finally know where it all comes from.
Mars is a rocky place. On Earth, dust is lifted from the rock by the natural forces of erosion, such as wind movement, water currents, volcanic activity, and glacier movement.
But on Mars, water and glacial activity The minimum, and other phenomena that could separate rock particles – such as meteorite impacts – would create coarser fragments, not the fine powder that suffocates Opportunity right now. "How is Mars doing so much dust?" Ojha of Johns Hopkins University, "because none of these processes is active on Mars?"
We now have our answer.
A new analysis of Ojha and other researchers reveals that a mysterious geological region on the red planet is what is behind this mass of churning dust.
How much dust? An estimated 3,000 billion kilograms are moved between the surface and the atmosphere of Mars each year.
This is a lot of dust, and the team thinks that almost everything comes from the mysterious Formation of Medusae Fossae, a depot described by ESA as "an enigmatic unit of origin enigmatic. "
Enigmatic, yes, and apparently not long for this world (or Mars, more to the point).
"Mars would not be so dusty if it was not for a huge deposit that gradually erodes over time and pollutes the planet," says Kevin Lewis, a planetary geophysicist
. NASA discovered the 1,000-kilometer geological formation in the 1960s, but it's only been so much more recently that scientists have learned that the feature is of volcanic origin – which means that it's all the same. is the largest known volcanic deposit of our solar system.
Even more surprising, the formation of Medusae Fossae was much larger but it's lightweight porous composition – vulnerable to erosion over the billions of years. Years – means that this jellyfish is a ghost of his old self.
The team identified training as the culprit in comparing the chemical composition of Martian dust to the readings of the formation of medusae Fossae taken by NASA Mars Odyssey spacecraft
"The dust is everywhere enriched with sulfur and chlorine. and it has that very distinct sulfur-to-chlorine ratio, "says Ojha.
It turns out that the revealing chemical signature is shared by the CFP, which scientists think was once as great as about 50 percent of the area of the United States
These days it's only about 20% – as we said at the top, the conditions on Mars do not forgive. [19659003] According to the team's calculations, this epic reduction of volcanic rock over the course of 3 billion years would equate to a thick overall layer of Martian dust, covering the surface of the red planet from one to the next. Dust deluge from 2 to 12 meters thick
The Earth has its own pollution problems, of course but when I come to dust, the red planet takes the cake.
The results are reported in Nature Communications .
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