Science and Technology: Water on the Red Planet
The planet Mars holds an austere beauty in its barrenness. Its scars hint at a time when it could have harbored life when great rivers carved deep into its dusty surface. However, billions of years later it appears to be not much more than a massive red desert capped by two spans of ice. For 15 years scientists have been searching for liquid water at Mars’ poles, and finally, on July 25th, 2018, water was discovered.
www.deerfieldfocalpoint.com/articles/science-and-technology-water-on-the-red-planet
As the Earth’s inhabitants grow in numbers, we continue to stretch our planet’s capacity further and further. Patches of garbage building up in oceans and enormous glaciers quickly melting away are only two of the issues the teeming population has wrought. Although noble efforts to save our deteriorating homeland are being made, humanity still may need to seek out a Plan B -- a role which seems to have fallen on our next-door neighbor, Mars.
Mars is widely regarded to be the next-best option to Earth, with factors such as climate and terrain being the most hospitable in the solar system. Even so, it’s hardly a haven just yet. One of the most glaring issues so far has been the planet’s lack of water, something absolutely necessary for any form of life. Although there are still so many other complications in transporting humans to another planet, the discovery of one of life’s essential building blocks on a planet previously believed to be completely barren is a very, very big deal.
Fifteen years ago, the quest for liquid water began. Researchers began using a device called MARSIS, or the Mars Advanced Radar for Surface and Ionosphere Sounding, which uses radar to detect water under the ice. The hunt was on, but most of its early scans turned up disappointingly blank. Every so often the machine would pick up positive signals, but these were so infrequent that researchers doubted their credibility.
Little did they know, MARSIS was actually finding liquid water, but most of the time, the data never made it to the scientists. Why not? The device was programmed to ignore small irregularities so the scans weren’t flooded with unimportant details. Unfortunately, the liquid water’s signals were so small that the device believed them to be irrelevant and smoothed over them as well. Essentially, no one had taught the machine to distinguish between important signals and excess data. The bug was quickly fixed and researchers continued scanning. Sure enough, positive results began to turn up consistently in one small patch of Mars’s South pole area.
As encouraging as this progress was, there was still not enough data to completely confirm the existence of water under the pole’s ice. So, scientists decided to test the patch’s permittivity, or its ability in an electric field to store energy; this quality is notably higher in water than it is in ice or rock. They discovered that the energy retained in the area in question was the highest yet found on Mars, and was comparable to subglacial lakes studied on Earth. With this new information, scientists confirmed the existence of a wide but shallow lake hidden under layers and layers of ice.
Mars’s eroded surface does provide evidence of much larger and more prominent rivers and lakes at some point in history. In addition, some minerals found on the planet are thought to be left over from water, strengthening the plausibility of this argument. As millions of years passed and the atmosphere began to dissolve, those bodies of water most likely evaporated.
Mars’s large patch of ice on its South pole may have played a large part in allowing for the newly discovered lake to exist in liquid form. The red planet’s atmosphere and temperature would usually freeze or evaporate water. However, the pressure from the ice as well as the salt found in the lake may have preserved the water’s state of matter by lowering its melting point, acting as a kind of natural antifreeze.
Although this discovery is a huge step in the right direction, it’s not time to pack up and move to Mars just yet. The only liquid water we know of so far is extremely cold and salty, and not many known life forms could survive in such an ecosystem. Even so, Nasa has already outlined a three-step plan for our journey to Mars, and some young astronauts are currently in training to be some of the first to travel, er, interplanetary.
The lake we just found could lead to more discoveries, perhaps some even closer to the middle of the planet. If water was found in a warmer, more hospitable region of Mars, there’s an even higher chance that Martians, even if only single-celled, could exist. For now, just stay on the lookout for UFOs, and we’ll keep you posted.
