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, Qin Xiaoguang At the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, his colleagues found fissures, crust, and clumps of particles on the dune crests of the Utopian Plains Mars Planitia, which can only be explained by liquid water 400,000 to 1.4 million 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.
For cracks formed by water-based cement, the mechanism proposed by Qin and his team is convincing. Matt Balme It was discovered at the Open University in the UK, but it’s still possible that it was formed by another Martian geological mechanism that’s not recognized 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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