Odd materials recently found on Mars have planetary scientists scratching their heads.
That’s because the materials were spotted at the red planet’s equator—but they appear to contain a large amount of water like that previously seen only at the Martian poles. The finding is based on new high-resolution radar data from the Martian subsurface, which show similarities between the properties of deposits on a hilly equatorial formation called Medusae Fossae and the sediments at the ice-rich poles.
November 3rd, 2007
Weird Mars Deposits Could Be Vast “Ice Cap” at Equator National Geographic News
October 17th, 2007
Martian Volcanoes May Not be Extinct
Mars appears to be a calm and desolate planet, but scientists now think something big is brewing beneath its wind-swept surface.
New research on Hawaiian volcanoes, combined with satellite imagery of Mars, suggests that three Martian volcanoes may only be dormant—not extinct. Instead of Mars’ crust moving over stationary magma “hot spots,” as occurs on Earth, researchers think the plumes travel.
“On Earth, the Hawaiian islands were built from volcanoes that erupted as the Earth’s crust slid over a hot spot—a plume of rising magma,” said Jacob Bleacher, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Our research raises the possibility that the opposite happens on Mars; a plume might move beneath stationary crust.”
June 28th, 2007
Huge Dust Storm Breaks Out on Mars
A major dust storm has developed on the red planet, blocking sunlight and prompting Mars mission managers to keep a close eye on it, SPACE.com has learned.
It is not known how large the storm might grow, but already it is thousands of miles across. If it balloons, as dust storms have done in the past, it could hamper operations of NASA’s Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
For now, officials don’t think the storm will threaten rover operations, however. In fact, the windy conditions on the planet have blown off large amounts of dust from the rovers’ solar arrays, giving them more power. The power boost may lend a helping hand to the Opportunity rover, should officials decide to send it into Victoria Crater.
June 13th, 2007
Mystery Solved: Mars Had Large Oceans
Since 1991, planetary scientists have floated the idea that Mars once harbored vast oceans that covered roughly one-third of the planet. Two long shore-like lips of rock in the planet’s northern hemisphere were thought to be the best evidence, but experts argued that they were too “hilly” to describe the smooth edges of ancient oceans.
The view just changed dramatically with a surprisingly simple breakthrough.
The once-flat shorelines were disfigured by a massive toppling over of the planet, scientists announced today. The warping of the Martian rock has hidden clear evidence of the oceans, which in any case have been gone for at least 2 billion years.
“This really confirms that there was an ocean on Mars,” said Mark Richards, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of the study, which is detailed in the June 14 issue of the journal Nature.
June 1st, 2007
Mars’s Liquid Center Cooling in Unusual Manner, Study Suggests National Geographic News
The planet Mars may well have a liquid center, scientists say.
That’s a surprise because Earth’s core, which contains similar elements as Mars, has a solid, metal interior surrounded by a layer of molten metal. The discovery was made by a team of European scientists using a device called a high-pressure anvil, which is capable of producing pressures of up to 6 million pounds per square inch (40 Gigapascals).
In experiments, the authors squeezed together high-temperature mixtures of iron, nickel, and sulfur to replicate conditions found on Mars. The researchers were able to determine that the Martian core is still mostly, if not entirely, liquid.
April 5th, 2007
Study: Red planet heating up
Earth’s dusty neighbor Mars is grappling with its own form of climate change as fluctuating solar radiation is kicking up dust and winds that may be melting the planet’s southern polar ice cap, scientists said Wednesday.
Researchers have been watching the changing face of Mars for years, studying slight differences in the brightness and darkness of its surface.
These changes in brightness have been generally attributed to the presence of dust, but until now their effect on wind circulation and climate has not been clear.
April 5th, 2007
Dust Storms Fuel Global Warming on Mars
Shifting dust storms on Mars might be contributing to global warming there that is shrinking the planet’s southern polar ice caps, scientists say.
Computer simulations similar to those used to predict weather here on Earth show that the bright, windblown dust and sand particles affects Mars’ albedo—the amount of sunlight reflected from the planet’s surface.
The research, detailed in the April 5 issue of the journal Nature, suggests these albedo variations play an important role in the climate of Mars. It could also potentially explain how global dust storms are triggered on the red planet.
March 2nd, 2007
Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says National Geographic News
Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human- induced—cause, according to one scientist’s controversial theory.
Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.
Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.
“The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars,” he said.
February 6th, 2007
Night Clouds Warm Red Planet
Nighttime clouds detected for the first time on Mars help to keep the planet’s surface warm after sunset when temperatures drop, a new study suggests.
The nocturnal clouds are five times thicker than their daytime counterparts and hover close to the ground, almost like a fog.
The study, conducted by researchers at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is detailed in the Feb. 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
January 26th, 2007
Mars’ Missing Air Might Just be Hiding
Rather than having had its air knocked out into space, Mars might just be holding its breath.
New findings suggests the missing atmosphere of Mars might be locked up in hidden reservoirs on the planet, rather than having been chafed away by billions of years’ worth of solar winds as previously thought.
Combining two years of observations by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, researchers determined that Mars is currently losing only about 20 grams of air per second into space.
Extrapolating this measurement back over 3.5 billion years, they estimate that only a small fraction, 0.2 to 4 millibars, of carbon dioxide and a few centimeters of water could have been lost to solar winds during that timeframe.