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Modern-day Mars may be more hospitable to oxygen-breathing life than previously thought.
O2 to support oxygen-breathing microbes, and even more complex organisms such as sponges.
"Nobody thought of Mars as a place where aerobic breathing would work," said Vlada Stamenkovic, an Earth and planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the work. "What we're saying is that it's possible that aerobic life has a chance."
As part of the report, Stamenkovic and its coauthors are most likely to contain the largest amounts of dissolved oxygen. This could help NASA and other space agencies plan to send landers to future missions, they said.
The work was published Monday in Nature Geoscience.
On its surface, the planet Mars is not what you would consider a hospitable place for most Earthlings.
Here on Earth, 21 percent of our atmosphere is made up of oxygen – thanks to the abundance of plants and other organisms that create oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis.
The Martian atmosphere, is made up of just .145 percent oxygen, according to the data collected by the Mars rovers.
With no plants to make O2, the tiny amount of oxygen on the planet is in the world.
In addition, Mars' atmosphere is extremely thin – 160 times thinner than Earth's atmosphere. In addition, the temperature at the surface frequently drops to minus 100, making it extremely difficult to liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.
Pure liquid water would be freeze or evaporate away on Mars, but salty water, or brines, could remain in a liquid state or just below the surface of the planet, the authors said. That's because of water mixed with water. (That's why those unfortunate people who live in cold climates use the ice on their sidewalks.)
In the first part of the paper, the authors of the paper, the authors of the paper, said:
These authors were convinced that these liquid brines could exist, their next step was to determine how much they could be absorbed from the atmosphere.
"If there are brines on Mars, then the oxygen would have no choice but to infiltrate them," said Woody Fischer, a geobiologist at Caltech who worked on the study. "The oxygen would make it everywhere."
To calculate how much oxygen the brines might be absorbed, the researchers had to consider their chemistry, and the Martian surface. Brines will absorb more oxygen when the temperature is lower and the air pressure is higher.
O2 to support oxygen-breathing microbes across the planet. They also found that oxygen concentrations would be especially high in the regions found, where temperatures are cooler.
So far, this work has been done through computer modeling. But experts still say that the study looks robust.
"The best studies that rely on models for their results can be influenced by the model output," said Kathleen Mandt, a planetary biologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This study is a good job at exploring a range of possible outcomes."
What the study does not do, however, is that there are indeed brines on Mars.
"What we know is that they should be brins on Mars, and that they would be able to dissolve enough oxygen to be biologically useful," Stamenkovic said.
The next step, he said, is two-fold.
He hopes that researchers here will be able to experiment with oxygen-breathing microbes in the brines that could occur on the march. The other step would be to send a message to Mars that can look for brines from the shallow to the deep subsurface.
"Amazing work has been done by NASA to look for evidence of past living environments," he said. "I am a big promoter of the world, and we can not wait to see if there is water on Mars."
To that end, Stamenkovic is working to develop a new tool, no bigger than a shoe box, which could be used to find water on Mars and its salinity, no digging necessary.
He calls it TH2OR.
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