Mars as seen by the Jurong Rover
Mars appears to have had liquid water on its surface 400,000 years ago, according to images taken by China’s Jurong spacecraft, possibly slowing the snow from melting and turning the dunes into a solid, cracked crust. helped.
There is a lot of evidence that Mars had vast deposits of liquid water at some point in ancient times, but how long this water has persisted, or how much has existed in Mars’ recent past? It is unknown whether there was an amount of
Now, Xiaoguang Qin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues have found fissures, crust and clumps of particles on the dunes of the Mars Plains of the Utopian Plain that can only be explained by between 400,000 and 1.4 million liquid water. Did. years ago.
“Dunes are a more modern terrain,” Qin says. “It was these crusts on the surface of the dunes that solidified them and made them immobile.”
Given the presence of certain salts in the sand, the team reasoned that water initially fell into the dunes in the form of snow and frost, later melting and mixing with the sand to form hydrated minerals. These minerals clumped together and hardened into place as the water evaporated, forming the cracked crust seen by the rover’s cameras.
The mechanism Qin and his team proposed for cracks formed by water-based cement is plausible, says Matt Balme of the Open University in the UK, but it could be due to another Martian geological mechanism. It is still possible that it was formed. We are unaware on Earth, he says.
Given the number of dunes seen on other Mars missions, it might be worth revisiting those images to see if similar features can be found, says Balme.
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