Analysing landscapes in the UAE has helped scientists in Abu Dhabi conclude that water flowed beneath the surface of Mars billions of years ago.
The findings from researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi suggest that the Red Planet could have provided a suitable environment for life longer than had previously been thought.
Using information from Nasa’s Curiosity rover, scientists made comparisons between the Gale crater on Mars and sites in UAE deserts with rocks made from hardened windblown sand.
Over time, ancient sand dunes in the Gale crater are thought to have turned into rock after contact with water billions of years ago.
The work was led by Dimitra Atri, the principal investigator of NYUAD’s Space Exploration Laboratory, and Vignesh Krishnamoorthy, a research assistant.
“Our findings show that Mars didn’t simply go from wet to dry,” Dr Atri said. “Even after its lakes and rivers disappeared, small amounts of water continued to move underground, creating protected environments that could have supported microscopic life.”
The waters of Mars
Water from mountains on Mars is thought to have once seeped into dunes through tiny cracks, soaking the sand from below. This left behind minerals such as gypsum, which is also found in deserts on Earth.
Traces of organic material may have been left behind and preserved in the minerals. The university said these minerals could be the focus of future missions looking for evidence of whether Mars ever played host to life.
The new research has been released in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets in a paper titled ‘Aeolian Sediment Lithification From Late-Stage Aqueous Activity in the Gale Crater: Implications for Habitability on Mars’.
Dr Atri has previously said that life may exist on Mars even in its present dry state, given that some organisms can survive in very harsh, dry conditions on Earth.
Some researchers have also suggested that life could exist far below the surface of the Red Planet, again by drawing comparison with Earth, where microorganisms can be found living many miles below the surface.
Does history offer clues?
Water was abundant on Mars during the planet’s early days, with experts having detected signs that streams, rivers and shorelines existed.
The atmosphere then was much thicker, trapping heat from the Sun and making the Red Planet – which is about 4.6 billion years old – much warmer than it is now.
There would have been a magnetic field created by molten metals in the core of the planet, but internal cooling about four billion years ago caused this magnetic field to weaken.
Over several hundred million years, with no magnetic field present any longer, the solar wind, a term for the flow of charged particles from the Sun, eliminated most of the atmosphere. It made Mars the cold and dry planet it is today.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and is about half as big as Earth, with a radius of 2,106 miles, according to Nasa.
It has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, both of which are potato-shaped: their mass is not large enough for gravity to make them spherical, Nasa has explained.
The latest research was carried out at NYUAD’s Centre for Astrophysics and Space Science and was supported by the NYUAD Research Institute.
The research group of Pance Naumov, a professor of chemistry at NYUAD, collaborated in the research work, as did James Weston, who is part of NYUAD’s core technology platform. Marieh Bassam Al Handawi, a postdoctoral associated in Prof Naumov’s laboratory, is another co-author of the new paper.
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