New study explains why there is no liquid water on Mars

Water on Mars

“The fate of Mars was decided from the start,” Kun Wang, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and lead author of the study, said in a statement. with a mass exceeding the mass of Mars. ”

During their study, the researchers measured the isotopic composition of potassium in several previously confirmed Martian meteorites, noting that the team sought to use potassium “as a kind of tracer of more volatile elements and compounds, such as l ‘water”.

The team was also able to discover that Mars “lost more potassium and other volatile substances than Earth during its formation,” which led to “a well-defined relationship between body size and body composition. isotopes of potassium “.

“Why there are so much less volatile elements and their compounds in dissimilar planets than in undifferentiated primordial meteorites is an age-old question,” said Katharina Loders, research professor of Earth and planetary sciences at university and co-author. of the study. This new discovery has important quantitative implications for when and how disparate planets received and lost their volatile matter.

Martian meteorites

As Wang explained, Martian meteorites are essentially “the only samples we have available to study the chemical makeup of Mars.”

Liquid water on Mars

He said: “There is no doubt about the existence of liquid water on the surface of Mars, but it is difficult to determine how much water was once on Mars through remote sensing studies and to rovers only. There are many models of the enormous water content of Mars, and in some of them early Mars was wetter than Earth, but we don’t think that assumption is correct. ”

Source: Sputnik International