Video – Here’s a piece that serves as a reminder about how valuable trees are to this world. Trees provide oxygen, absorb floodwater, provide shelter and food, and so forth, yet we continue to destroy the world’s ancient forests. It’s time to stop looking at trees as a commodity and consider them an endangered species. [...]
Tag: oxygen (page 1 of 4)
A Failed War On Cancer Sayer Ji, Green Med InfoEver since Richard Nixon officially declared a war on cancer in 1971 through the signing of the National Cancer Act, over a hundred billion dollars of taxpayer money has been spent on research and drug development in an attempt to eradicate the disease, with trillions more spent by the cancer patients themselves, but with disappointing results.Even after four decades of waging full-scale “conventional” (s [...]
Marco Torres, Prevent DiseaseCompounds within garlic produce reactive oxygen species in cancer cells, activating of multiple death cascades and blocking pathways of tumor proliferation. Eating garlic just twice per week reduces cancer risk without any side effects whatsoever.The reason so many people die with conventional cancer treatment is that while damaging healthy cells, chemotherapy also triggers them to secrete a protein that sustains tumour growth and resistance to [...]
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| An Indiana firm is developing a method to make oxygen on Mars for Nasa. Bacteria and algae will use Martian soil as fuel to pump out oxygen. Mars could be scattered with biodomes containing the organisms. And future astronauts could use this oxygen to survive on the surface (artist's illustration shown) |
- An Indiana firm is developing a method to make oxygen on Mars for Nasa
- Bacteria and algae will use Martian soil as fuel to pump out oxygen
- Mars could be scattered with biodomes containing the organisms
- And future astronauts could use this oxygen to survive on the surface
If humans land on Mars in the 2030s as planned, one thing that will be essential to their survival will be self-sufficiency, as they won’t be able to take too much cargo with them.
With this in mind Nasa is testing whether oxygen can be created from Martian soil, without having to carry it all the way from Earth.
The innovative method would see bacteria or algae use the soil as fuel, pumping out usable oxygen in the process for astronauts on the surface.
Nasa has been working with Techshot Inc of Greenville, Indiana to develop this method in a so-called ‘Mars room’, which mimics the conditions on the red planet.
It is able to simulate the atmospheric pressure on the planet, in addition to the day-night temperature changes and the solar radiation that hits the surface.
In experiments, certain organisms were capable of producing oxygen from Martian soil - known as regolith - and they also removed nitrogen from it.
‘This is a possible way to support a human mission to Mars, producing oxygen without having to send heavy gas canisters,’ said Eugene Boland, chief scientist at Techshot.
‘Let’s send microbes and let them do the heavy-lifting for us.’
The research is part of the Nasa Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Programme.
It’s envisioned that biodomes could be scattered across the surface to produce the oxygen needed for humans to survive.
The oxygen produced could also be stored for later use.
But while experiments on Earth are all well and good, the scientists want to test their method actually on Mars in the near future.
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The 'Mars room', shown, is able to simulate the atmospheric pressure on the planet, in addition to the day-night temperature changes and the solar radiation that hits the surface. In experiments certain organisms were capable of producing oxygen from Martian soil inside the laboratory
When humans land on Mars in the future (artist's illustration of the landing shown left), they will need to be as self-sufficient as possible.
To do so, an upcoming rover - such as the 2020 Mars rover - could carry small container-like devices with Earth organisms inside.
The containers would be buried a few inches underground in certain locations, to see how successful they are at producing oxygen.
Sensors inside the container would detect how much oxygen was made, and report the findings back to a satellite in Mars orbit.
The scientists note that the container would be sealed tightly, to prevent the organisms being exposed to - and possibly contaminating - the Martian surface.
But if proven successful, future explorers on Mars may use multiple biodomes like this to produce the oxygen they need to survive.
Sonia Luokkala, Earth Island JournalWaking TimesThe mesas of Monument Valley rise deep red on the horizon. We are in Diné Bikéyah, land of the Navajo.“This is John Wayne country,” trained Navajo guide Gregory Holiday repeats his lines for an enchanted group of tourists. The view opens boundless to the sacred land of the Diné people, but for visitors it is presented as the iconic west of cowboys and Americana.The sun sets and the last traveler boards t [...]
Excerpt from thespacereporter.com
The formation of water vapor after the Big Bang was constrained by the lack of oxygen; it and other elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were created only later on, in the death throes of the first generation of massive stars. Oxygen created by the demises of early stars was swept out in to space by the explosions of supernovae and stellar winds, eventually joining with hydrogen to form water.
This process created islands of gas replete with heavy elements, such as oxygen; these regions were more bereft of oxygen than gaseous regions in the modern Milky Way galaxy. However, a new study by Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has determined that, in certain islands, water vapor might have been as plentiful as it is today, only a billion years after the Big Bang.
According to a CfA statement, the researchers looked at whether water could form in the primordial molecular clouds, which were deficient in oxygen. Their analysis indicated that large quantities of water could form at around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Water molecules would have been shattered by ultraviolet light emitted by stars; however, after hundreds of millions of years, an equilibrium between water creation and destruction would be reached.
“We looked at the chemistry within young molecular clouds containing a thousand times less oxygen than our Sun. To our surprise, we found we can get as much water vapor as we see in our own galaxy,” said astrophysicist Avi Loeb of CfA.
The new study has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and is accessible online.
Excerpt from naplesnews.com
Many things would be difficult about conducting a manned mission to Mars, from designing a spacecraft that could make the 34-million-mile journey, to stocking and fueling it, to keeping its astronauts from getting flabby and bored.
On Friday, researchers shed light on another potential hurdle: figuring out a way to protect travelers’ brains from the damaging effects of cosmic rays in outer space.
When University of California, Irvine neuroscientist Charles Limoli and colleagues exposed mice to radiation similar to that astronauts would encounter far beyond Earth, the animals experienced changes in their brains that impaired their performance on tests of learning and memory, the team reported in an article — “What happens to your brain on the way to Mars” — in the journal Science Advances.
The researchers’ results suggested that astronauts could suffer cognitive impairment during an extended journey through space.
“Over the course of a two- to three-year mission, the damage would accumulate,” Limoli said. “To mitigate it, we need to understand it.”
To test the effects of space radiation on the brain, the researchers took mice to the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, which attempts to simulate radiation conditions in space. They exposed the animals to oxygen and titanium ions, atoms with their electrons stripped away that are similar to the charged particles in cosmic rays.
Six weeks later, back in California, they tested the mice’s learning and memory by placing them in pens with toys, letting them get used to their surroundings, and then making changes such as introducing a new toy. Mice that had been exposed to the radiation were less aware of or curious about the changes in their environment than controls that had not been irradiated — a sign that they had cognitive deficits.
“A smart animal will recognize the change,” Limoli said.
When the researchers later studied the animals’ brain tissue, they found that mice that performed poorly on the tests also had less dense branching in their brain cells, due to damage from the radiation. The structural changes would impede the brain’s ability to transmit signals and process information.
Limoli got involved in the NASA-backed research as an outgrowth of his work on the effects of radiation on brain cancer patients. Radiation therapy forestalls brain cancer progression, he said — but it can take a tremendous toll on the central nervous system, causing depression, anxiety and mood disorders, and deficits in learning and executive function. Pediatric patients can lose 20 to 30 I.Q. points after receiving radiation treatments to the brain.
“Doctors have gotten really good at curing cancer, but maintaining a good quality of life has been a problem,” Limoli said. “This is an unmet medical need.”
Astronauts flying to Mars and getting hit by cosmic rays, which are the remnants of supernova explosions, wouldn’t get anything close to the high doses of radiation that cancer patients receive, but they “might be prone to mistakes,” Limoli thought.
To counteract that threat during planning for a possible mission, scientists might come up with more advanced shielding options — perhaps embedded in helmets — or drug treatments that might ameliorate radiation’s impacts on the brain, similar to the ones Limoli is exploring for cancer patients.
On Friday, researchers shed light on another potential hurdle: figuring out a way to protect travelers’ brains from the damaging effects of cosmic rays in outer space.
When University of California, Irvine neuroscientist Charles Limoli and colleagues exposed mice to radiation similar to that astronauts would encounter far beyond Earth, the animals experienced changes in their brains that impaired their performance on tests of learning and memory, the team reported in an article — “What happens to your brain on the way to Mars” — in the journal Science Advances.
The researchers’ results suggested that astronauts could suffer cognitive impairment during an extended journey through space.
“Over the course of a two- to three-year mission, the damage would accumulate,” Limoli said. “To mitigate it, we need to understand it.”
To test the effects of space radiation on the brain, the researchers took mice to the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, which attempts to simulate radiation conditions in space. They exposed the animals to oxygen and titanium ions, atoms with their electrons stripped away that are similar to the charged particles in cosmic rays.
Six weeks later, back in California, they tested the mice’s learning and memory by placing them in pens with toys, letting them get used to their surroundings, and then making changes such as introducing a new toy. Mice that had been exposed to the radiation were less aware of or curious about the changes in their environment than controls that had not been irradiated — a sign that they had cognitive deficits.
“A smart animal will recognize the change,” Limoli said.
When the researchers later studied the animals’ brain tissue, they found that mice that performed poorly on the tests also had less dense branching in their brain cells, due to damage from the radiation. The structural changes would impede the brain’s ability to transmit signals and process information.
Limoli got involved in the NASA-backed research as an outgrowth of his work on the effects of radiation on brain cancer patients. Radiation therapy forestalls brain cancer progression, he said — but it can take a tremendous toll on the central nervous system, causing depression, anxiety and mood disorders, and deficits in learning and executive function. Pediatric patients can lose 20 to 30 I.Q. points after receiving radiation treatments to the brain.
“Doctors have gotten really good at curing cancer, but maintaining a good quality of life has been a problem,” Limoli said. “This is an unmet medical need.”
Astronauts flying to Mars and getting hit by cosmic rays, which are the remnants of supernova explosions, wouldn’t get anything close to the high doses of radiation that cancer patients receive, but they “might be prone to mistakes,” Limoli thought.
To counteract that threat during planning for a possible mission, scientists might come up with more advanced shielding options — perhaps embedded in helmets — or drug treatments that might ameliorate radiation’s impacts on the brain, similar to the ones Limoli is exploring for cancer patients.
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| The James Webb Telescope |
Excerpt from space.com
A telescope will soon allow astronomers to probe the atmosphere of Earthlike exoplanets for signs of life. To prepare, astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger and her team are modeling the atmospheric fingerprints for hundreds of potential alien worlds. Here's how:
The James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018, will usher a new era in our search for life beyond Earth. With its 6.5-meter mirror, the long-awaited successor to Hubble will be large enough to detect potential biosignatures in the atmosphere of Earthlike planets orbiting nearby stars.
And we may soon find a treasure-trove of such worlds. The forthcoming exoplanet hunter TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), set to launch in 2017, will scout the entire sky for planetary systems close to ours. (The current Kepler mission focuses on more distant stars, between 600 and 3,000 light-years from Earth.)
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| Astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger |
While TESS will allow for the brief detection of new planets, the larger James Webb will follow up on select candidates and provide clues about their atmospheric composition. But the work will be difficult and require a lot of telescope time.
"We're expecting to find thousands of new planets with TESS, so we'll need to select our best targets for follow-up study with the Webb telescope," says Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at Cornell University and co-investigator on the TESS team.
To prepare, Kaltenegger and her team at Cornell's Institute for Pale Blue Dots are building a database of atmospheric fingerprints for hundreds of potential alien worlds. The models will then be used as "ID cards" to guide the study of exoplanet atmospheres with the Webb and other future large telescopes.
Kaltenegger described her approach in a talk for the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Director Seminar Series last December.
"For the first time in human history, we have the technology to find and characterize other worlds," she says. "And there's a lot to learn."
Detecting life from space
In its 1990 flyby of Earth, the Galileo spacecraft took a spectrum of sunlight filtered through our planet's atmosphere. In a 1993 paper in the journal Nature, astronomer Carl Sagan analyzed that data and found a large amount of oxygen together with methane — a telltale sign of life on Earth. These observations established a control experiment for the search of extraterrestrial life by modern spacecraft."The spectrum of a planet is like a chemical fingerprint," Kaltenegger says. "This gives us the key to explore alien worlds light years away."
Current telescopes have picked up the spectra of giant, Jupiter-like exoplanets. But the telescopes are not large enough to do so for smaller, Earth-like worlds. The James Webb telescope will be our first shot at studying the atmospheres of these potentially habitable worlds.
Some forthcoming ground-based telescopes — including the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), planned for completion in 2020, and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), scheduled for first light in 2024 — may also be able to contribute to that task. [The Largest Telescopes on Earth: How They Compare]
And with the expected discovery by TESS of thousands of nearby exoplanets, the James Webb and other large telescopes will have plenty of potential targets to study. Another forthcoming planet hunter, the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO), a planned European Space Agency mission scheduled for launch around 2022-2024, will contribute even more candidates.
However, observation time for follow-up studies will be costly and limited.
"It will take hundreds of hours of observation to see atmospheric signatures with the Webb telescope," Kaltenegger says. "So we'll have to pick our targets carefully."
Set to see its first light in 2021, The Giant Magellan Telescope will be the world’s largest telescope.
Getting a head start
To guide that process, Kaltenegger and her team are putting together a database of atmospheric fingerprints of potential alien worlds. "The models are tools that can teach us how to observe and help us prioritize targets," she says.To start, they have modeled the chemical fingerprint of Earth over geological time. Our planet's atmosphere has evolved over time, with different life forms producing and consuming various gases. These models may give astronomers some insight into a planet's evolutionary stage.
Other models take into consideration the effects of a host of factors on the chemical signatures — including water, clouds, atmospheric thickness, geological cycles, brightness of the parent star, and even the presence of different extremophiles.
"It's important to do this wide range of modeling right now," Kaltenegger said, "so we're not too startled if we detect something unexpected. A wide parameter space can allow us to figure out if we might have a combination of these environments."
She added: "It can also help us refine our modeling as fast as possible, and decide if more measurements are needed while the telescope is still in space. It's basically a stepping-stone, so we don't have to wait until we get our first measurements to understand what we are seeing. Still, we'll likely find things we never thought about in the first place."
A new research center
The spectral database is one of the main projects undertaken at the Institute for Pale Blue Dots, a new interdisciplinary research center founded in 2014 by Kaltenegger. The official inauguration will be held on May 9, 2015."The crux of the institute is the characterization of rocky, Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of nearby stars," Kaltenergger said. "It's a very interdisciplinary effort with people from astronomy, geology, atmospheric modeling, and hopefully biology."
She added: "One of the goal is to better understand what makes a planet a life-friendly habitat, and how we can detect that from light years away. We're on the verge of discovering other pale blue dots. And with Sagan's legacy, Cornell University is a really great home for an institute like that."
The submersible could extract cores from the seabed to unlock a rich climatic historyExcerpt from bbc.comDropping a robotic lander on to the surface of a comet was arguably one of the most audacious space achievements of recent times. But one...
Excerpt from cnn.com A severe solar storm created a stunning display of light in the night sky over parts of the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand early Wednesday morning, spotted by those lucky enough to be awake in the wee h...
Excerpt from smithsonianmag.com
In the hunt for alien life, our first glimpse of extraterrestrials may be in the rainbow of colors seen coming from the surface of an exoplanet.
That's the deceptively simple idea behind a study led by Siddharth Hegde at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. Seen from light-years away, plants on Earth give our planet a distinctive hue in the near-infrared, a phenomenon called red edge. That's because the chlorophyll in plants absorbs most visible light waves but starts to become transparent to wavelengths on the redder end of the spectrum. An extraterrestrial looking at Earth through a telescope could match this reflected color with the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere and conclude there is life here.
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| Eight of the 137 microorganism samples used to measure biosignatures for the catalog of reflection signatures of Earth life forms. In each panel, the top is a regular photograph of the sample and the bottom is a micrograph, a version of the top image zoomed-in 400 times. |
Plants, though, have only been around for 500 million years—a relative blip in our planet's 4.6-billion-year history. Microbes dominated the scene for some 2.5 billion years in the past, and some studies suggest they will rule the Earth again for much of its future. So Hegde and his team gathered 137 species of microorganisms that all have different pigments and that reflect light in specific ways. By building up a library of the microbes' reflectance spectra—the types of colors those microscopic critters reflect from a distance—scientists examining the light from habitable exoplanets can have a plethora of possible signals to search for, the team argues this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"No one had looked at the wide range of diverse life on Earth and asked how we could potentially spot such life on other planets, and include life from extreme environments on Earth that could be the 'norm' on other planets," Lisa Kaltenegger, a co-author on the study, says via email. "You can use it to model an Earth that is different and has different widespread biota and look how it would appear to our telescopes."
To make sure they got enough diversity, the researchers looked at temperate-dwelling microbes as well as creatures that live in extreme environments like deserts, mineral springs, hydrothermal vents or volcanically active areas.
While it might seem that alien life could take a huge variety of forms—for instance, something like the silicon-based Horta from Star Trek—it's possible to narrow things down if we restrict the search to life as we know it. First, any life-form that is carbon-based and uses water as a solvent isn't going to like the short wavelengths of light far in the ultraviolet, because this high-energy UV can damage organic molecules. At the other end of the spectrum, any molecule that alien plants (or their analogues) use to photosynthesize won't be picking up light that's too far into the infrared, because there's not enough energy at those longer wavelengths.
In addition, far-infrared light is hard to see through an Earth-like atmosphere because the gases block a lot of these waves, and whatever heat the planet emits will drown out any signal from surface life. That means the researchers restricted their library to the reflected colors we can see when looking at wavelengths in the visible part of the spectrum, the longest wavelength UV and short-wave infrared.
The library won't be much use if we can't see the planets' surfaces in the first place, and that's where the next generation of telescopes comes in, Kaltenegger says. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, should be able to see the spectra of relatively small exoplanet atmospheres and help scientists work out their chemical compositions, but it won't be able to see any reflected spectra from material at the surface. Luckily, there are other planned telescopes that should be able to do the job. The European Extremely Large Telescope, a 40-meter instrument in Chile, will be complete by 2022. And NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which is funded and in its design stages, should be up and running by the mid-2020s.
Another issue is whether natural geologic or chemical processes could look like life and create a false signal. So far the pigments from life-forms look a lot different from those reflected by minerals, but the team hasn't examined all the possibilities either, says Kaltenegger. They hope to do more testing in the future as they build up the digital library, which is now online and free for anyone to explore at biosignatures.astro.cornell.edu.
Excerpt from cbsnews.comALT LAKE CITY -- Police responding to a report from a fisherman about an overturned car in an icy Utah river were stunned to discover an 18-month-old girl dangling in a car seat inside, unconscious but alive. The officers also ...
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| Artist impression of Mars ocean |
Excerpt from news.discovery.com
Mars was once a small, wet and blue world, but over the past 4 billion years, Mars dried up and became the red dust bowl we know today.
But how much water did Mars possess? According to research published in the journal Science, the Martian northern hemisphere was likely covered in an ocean, covering a region of the approximate area as Earth’s Atlantic Ocean, plunging, in some places, to 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) deep.
“Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space,” said Geronimo Villanueva, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new paper, in an ESO news release. “With this work, we can better understand the history of water on Mars.”
Over a 6-year period, Villanueva and his team used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (in Chile) and instruments at the W. M. Keck Observatory and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii) to study the distribution of water molecules in the Martian atmosphere. By building a comprehensive map of water distribution and seasonal changes, they were able to arrive at this startling conclusion.
It is becoming clear that, over the aeons, Mars lost the majority of its atmosphere to space. That also goes for its water. Though large quantities of water were likely frozen below the surface as the atmosphere thinned and cooled, the water contained in an ocean of this size must have gone elsewhere — it must have also been lost to space.
The water in Earth’s oceans contains molecules of H2O, the familiar oxygen atom bound with 2 hydrogen atoms, and, in smaller quantities, the not-so-familiar HDO molecule. HDO is a type of water molecule that contains 1 hydrogen atom, 1 oxygen atom and 1 deuterium atom. The deuterium atom is an isotope of hydrogen; whereas hydrogen consists of 1 proton and an electron, deuterium consists of 1 proton, 1 neutron and 1 electron. Therefore, due to the extra neutron the deuterium contains, HDO molecules are slightly heavier than the regular H2O molecules.
Also known as “semi-heavy water,” HDO is less susceptible to being evaporated away and being lost to space, so logic dictates that if water is boiled (or sublimated) away on Mars, the H2O molecules will be preferentially lost to space whereas a higher proportion of HDO will be left behind.
By using powerful ground-based observatories, the researchers were able to determine the distribution of HDO molecules and the H2O molecules and compare their ratios to liquid water that is found in its natural state.
Of particular interest is Mars’ north and south poles where icecaps containing water and carbon dioxide ice persist to modern times. The water those icecaps contain is thought to document the evolution of water since the red planet’s wet Noachian period (approximately 3.7 billion years ago) to today. It turns out that the water measured in these polar regions is enriched with HDO by a factor of 7 when compared with water in Earth’s oceans. This, according to the study, indicates that Mars has lost a volume of water 6.5 times larger than the water currently contained within the modern-day icecaps.
Therefore, the volume of Mars’ early ocean must have been at least 20 million cubic kilometers, writes the news release.
Taking into account the Martian global terrain, most of the water would have been concentrated around the northern plains, a region dominated by low-lying land. An ancient ocean, with this estimate volume of water, would have covered 19 percent of the Martian globe, a significant area considering the Atlantic Ocean covers 17 percent of the Earth’s surface.
“With Mars losing that much water, the planet was very likely wet for a longer period of time than previously thought, suggesting the planet might have been habitable for longer,” said Michael Mumma, also of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
This estimate is likely on the low-side as Mars is thought to contain significant quantities of water ice below its surface — a fact that surveys such as this can be useful for pinpointing exactly where the remaining water may be hiding.
Ulli Kaeufl, of the European Southern Observatory and co-author of the paper, added: “I am again overwhelmed by how much power there is in remote sensing on other planets using astronomical telescopes: we found an ancient ocean more than 100 million kilometers away!”
Source: ESO
But how much water did Mars possess? According to research published in the journal Science, the Martian northern hemisphere was likely covered in an ocean, covering a region of the approximate area as Earth’s Atlantic Ocean, plunging, in some places, to 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) deep.
“Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space,” said Geronimo Villanueva, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new paper, in an ESO news release. “With this work, we can better understand the history of water on Mars.”
Over a 6-year period, Villanueva and his team used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (in Chile) and instruments at the W. M. Keck Observatory and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii) to study the distribution of water molecules in the Martian atmosphere. By building a comprehensive map of water distribution and seasonal changes, they were able to arrive at this startling conclusion.
It is becoming clear that, over the aeons, Mars lost the majority of its atmosphere to space. That also goes for its water. Though large quantities of water were likely frozen below the surface as the atmosphere thinned and cooled, the water contained in an ocean of this size must have gone elsewhere — it must have also been lost to space.
This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about four billion years ago. The young planet Mars would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 meters deep, but it is more likely that the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere.
Also known as “semi-heavy water,” HDO is less susceptible to being evaporated away and being lost to space, so logic dictates that if water is boiled (or sublimated) away on Mars, the H2O molecules will be preferentially lost to space whereas a higher proportion of HDO will be left behind.
By using powerful ground-based observatories, the researchers were able to determine the distribution of HDO molecules and the H2O molecules and compare their ratios to liquid water that is found in its natural state.
Of particular interest is Mars’ north and south poles where icecaps containing water and carbon dioxide ice persist to modern times. The water those icecaps contain is thought to document the evolution of water since the red planet’s wet Noachian period (approximately 3.7 billion years ago) to today. It turns out that the water measured in these polar regions is enriched with HDO by a factor of 7 when compared with water in Earth’s oceans. This, according to the study, indicates that Mars has lost a volume of water 6.5 times larger than the water currently contained within the modern-day icecaps.
Therefore, the volume of Mars’ early ocean must have been at least 20 million cubic kilometers, writes the news release.
Taking into account the Martian global terrain, most of the water would have been concentrated around the northern plains, a region dominated by low-lying land. An ancient ocean, with this estimate volume of water, would have covered 19 percent of the Martian globe, a significant area considering the Atlantic Ocean covers 17 percent of the Earth’s surface.
“With Mars losing that much water, the planet was very likely wet for a longer period of time than previously thought, suggesting the planet might have been habitable for longer,” said Michael Mumma, also of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
This estimate is likely on the low-side as Mars is thought to contain significant quantities of water ice below its surface — a fact that surveys such as this can be useful for pinpointing exactly where the remaining water may be hiding.
Ulli Kaeufl, of the European Southern Observatory and co-author of the paper, added: “I am again overwhelmed by how much power there is in remote sensing on other planets using astronomical telescopes: we found an ancient ocean more than 100 million kilometers away!”
Source: ESO
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