Water on Mars: Exploration & Evidence

A primitive ocean on Mars held more water than Earth’s Arctic Ocean, according research published in Science on March 5. Most of the water – 87 percent – escaped into space, say the scientists.

About four billion years ago, the young planet would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 meters (450 feet) deep. But, the researchers say, it’s more likely that the water would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere, and in some regions reaching depths greater than 1.6 kilometers (1 mile).

NASA scientists used ground-based observatories to measure water signatures in the Mars atmosphere. Scientists are searching for answers to why this vast water supply left the surface and was lost to space.

                         

Geronimo Villanueva is a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new paper. He said:

Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space. With this work, we can better understand the history of water on Mars.

Where was this water on Mars? Based on the surface of Mars today, the researchers say a likely location for this water would be in Mars’ Northern Plains, considered a good candidate because of the low-lying ground. An ancient ocean there would have covered 19 percent of the planet’s surface. By comparison, the Atlantic Ocean occupies 17 percent of Earth’s surface.

Michael Mumma is a senior scientist at NASA Goddard and the second author on the paper. He said:

With Mars losing that much water, the planet was very likely wet for a longer period of time than was previously thought, suggesting it might have been habitable for longer.

The study is based on detailed observations made at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the W.M. Keck Observatory and NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. With these powerful instruments, the researchers distinguished the chemical signatures of two slightly different forms of water in Mars’ atmosphere. One is the familiar H2O. The other is HDO, a naturally occurring variation in which one hydrogen is replaced by a heavier form, called deuterium.

By comparing the ratio of HDO to H2O in water on Mars today and comparing it with the ratio in water trapped in a Mars meteorite dating from about 4.5 billion years ago, scientists can measure the subsequent atmospheric changes and determine how much water has escaped into space.

Bottom line: Research published in Science on March 5, 2015 says that a primitive ocean on Mars held more water than Earth’s Arctic Ocean. Most of the water – 87 percent – escaped into space, say the scientists.

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Space radio waves align in mysterious mathematical pattern, could be produced by alien technology

Mysterious bursts of energy coming from space align in a mathematical pattern, and so could be emanating from alien technology, according to scientists.

Blitzars, which last only about a millisecond, have been detected by telescopes since about 2001 and have been heard ten times since. And nobody really knows where they come from, or why they happen.

But a new study has found that the bursts line up in a way that is not explained by existing physics, reports the New Scientist.

Scientists tried to work out how far the bursts have travelled through space to get to us, using “dispersion measures”. That looks at how the radiowaves that are being sent get scattered as they travel through space — the higher the dispersion measure, the further that radiowaves seem to have been sent before they arrived.

All of the ten bursts that have been detected so far have dispersion measures that line up as multiples of a single number: 187.5. The chances of them doing so are 5 in 10,000, the scientists behind the study claim.

John Learned, from the University of Hawaii in Manoa, led the study with Michael Hippke from the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany. Learned said that the line-up was “very, very hard to explain”.

There are two theories for why the coincidence is happening, according to the researchers. The first proposes that each of the bursts were sent from regularly spaced intervals: five sources, at equally spaced distances from the Earth. But the more likely one says that they probably came from somewhere much closer, like in the Milky Way, but are being mysteriously sent with a delay that matches up to the strange pattern.

There is little reason for the bursts to line up in this way if they are being sent by natural bodies, the scientists said. Some stars have sent out bursts of radio waves, but without the power or regular pattern that has been found in the fast radio bursts. However, it may be that there is some astrophysics that scientists are yet to understand that has been driving the timing.

It could also be that the signals are not coming from space at all, but form much closer. The messages could be coming from a secret satellite that is hiding its messages so that they appear to come from much deeper in space.

But the scientists conclude that if none of the other explanations work out, “An artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered”.

While scientists have long considered that the bursts could be messages from aliens, the new finding could lend extra credence to that theory. Researchers have been attempting to work out whether a message is encoded in the bursts — and it seems they might now have found one.

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