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NASA is exploring Mars in hopes of finding fossilized life, but the possibility that there are currently living creatures on the Red Planet may have taken a big turn, according to a new study, and it can be said that the researchers’ belief that there are lakes of liquid water lurking beneath the surface of Mars, may in fact be frozen clay sediments.
According to the “RT” website, Isaac Smith, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute, says a new analysis of the 2018 radar data extracted from the MARSIS instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft supports the idea. of liquid water on Mars.
“To date, all previous research papers have only been able to suggest gaps in the lakes debate. This is the first paper to show that another substance is the most likely cause of the sightings,” he said. Smith said in a statement.
“Now our paper presents the first plausible, and by far the most likely, alternative hypothesis to explain the MARSIS observations. Specifically, hard clays frozen at very cold temperatures can cause inversions.”
Since it would take large amounts of heat and salt to keep the water liquid in the southern Mars ice cap, Smith says it’s more plausible than minerals known as smectites, a type of igneous rock-like clay that is “extremely available” on Mars, This prompted scientists to initially interpret radar readings as liquid water.
The researchers cooled the smectites in the lab to -45 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, water-bound smectites can generate the light radar reflections detected by MARSIS.
Smith explained that “smectites are a type of clay that is abundant on the surface of Mars, covering about 50% of the surface, and is particularly concentrated in the southern hemisphere.”
He continued, “Recent theoretical work suggests that clays might have brilliant sheen, but no one has frozen them at the temperatures we see on Mars – 40 to 50 degrees below zero – and they measured them, and they have not identified these minerals in Antarctica. “
The average temperature on Mars is around -81 degrees Fahrenheit on average, according to NASA.
However, it can range from -220 degrees Fahrenheit in winter at the poles to a high 70 degrees Fahrenheit at lower latitudes in summer, according to the National Weather Service.
And in 2018, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere (MARSIS) detected regions of radar evidence from a liquid lake beneath the southern polar ice of Mars.
Two years later, researchers discovered several salt lakes in the area, each about six miles wide.
Smith is also convinced that lakes made of liquid water are “hard to bear at this point,” but not everyone, including NASA’s Jeffrey Plot at JPL, is convinced.
In a separate statement, Plott said, “In planetary science we often get a little closer to the truth. The original article did not prove it was water, and these new articles do not prove it was not. narrow the range of possibilities as much as possible in order to reach a consensus. “.
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