Friday, March 29

Map shows the areas of Mars that had water | Digital Trends Spanish


A group of researchers has just published a map of Mars that took more than ten years to make, and that with the help of the mars express orbiter of the European Space Agency and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, managed to highlight the places on the current Martian soil that once had water.

“I think we have collectively simplified Mars too much,” said in a statement planetary scientist at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Paris John Carter, lead author of the Article which has just been published in Icarus magazine.

Before this work, scientists knew of only about 1,000 rock formations on Mars that contained hydrated minerals. But the new map reveals hundreds of thousands of such sediments. “This work has just established that when you study ancient terrain in detail, not seeing these minerals is actually a rarity in itself,” Carter said.

Aqueous minerals can be found in rocks that were chemically altered by water in the past, often turning into clays and salts. When small amounts of water interact with rocks, they remain relatively unchanged and retain the same minerals found in the original volcanic rocks. But if large amounts of water interact with these rocks, then the soluble elements are dissolved by the water, leaving behind aluminum-rich clays.

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