Possible Ancient Life Site Found on Mars
“If you’re trying to find life on Mars, the more and different places that exist, the better the chances are that one of them is going to have the right conditions,” said Phil Christensen. “It takes a lot of water to form salt, so this is another place to look.”
According to Phil Christensen, a planetary geologist at Arizona State University, the latest satellite imagery that is revealing Martian salt deposits across southern Mars could quite possibly be the sites of ancient life. Brinery pools filled with mats of sodium chloride are thought to serve as evidence of life on Mars, the same sodium chloride or salt we use on the kitchen table. Additionally, several other researchers are coming to the conclusion that the salt mineral in the ancient Martian pools were hospitable to early life on the red planet.
Christensen co-authored a March 21, 2008 study in the “Science” journal, detailing the findings of Martian salt deposits, which had been funding by NASA, which he feels are a clear sign of water’s past presence—a welcoming environment for life on Mars soon to be discovered. Christensen feels that the newly found salt deposits were not as acidic as some of the other researched areas on Mars where water was thought to exist—the clay and hydrated mineral deposits.
The research time, using the Mars Odyssey orbiter’s thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) and a couple of years, found several sites in a belt just south of the Martian equator. “Once we realized we were looking at a transparent mineral, the light bulbs in our heads went off,” he said. “When you look at the sites with visual satellite images, they look all the world like dried-up salt flats.”
With an age of 3.5 billion Earth years old, the route for Christensen to identify the salt deposits was not an easy one. “Salt, it turns out, is pretty hard to detect,” Christensen said, explaining that light analysis, or spectroscopy, of the mineral doesn’t often show clear-cut signatures in satellite data. “They’re actually very transparent, so there’s generally a lot of difficulty in identifying them.”
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
