The meteorological station on the Mars rover Curiosity measured relatively high humidity during the Martian winter nights, and the hypothesis is that this is underground water that evaporated into the atmosphere
Weather conditions and the composition of the Martian soil that NASA's Curiosity rover measured, along with the type of salt found in the Martian soil, can bring liquid salt to the surface at night.
Perchlorate, the substance identified in the Martian soil by Curiosity and previously by NASA's Phoenix Mars lander, is a substance with a property that causes it to absorb water vapor from the atmosphere and lower the freezing temperature of water. The existence of this material has been proposed for years as a mechanism for the possible existence of liquid brines at higher latitudes on modern Mars, despite the cold and dry conditions of the Red Planet.
New calculations based on measurements made by Curiosity over a year indicate that conditions at the rover's location, near the equator, were favorable for the formation of small amounts of salt to create moisture over several nights, and the area dries out again after sunrise. Conditions for water vapor formation should be even more favorable at higher latitudes, where temperatures are cold and more water vapor can result in higher relative humidity more often.
"Liquid water is a requirement for life as we know it, and a target for Mars exploration missions," said the paper's lead author, Javier Martín-Torres of the Spanish Research Council in Spain and Vlaö University of Technology in Sweden, and a member of Curiosity's science team. "The conditions near the surface on today's Mars are hardly suitable for bacterial life, but the existence of liquid brines on Mars has a wider implication regarding the possibility of the ability to sustain water-based life and geological processes."
The weather data published in the April 13 issue of the journal Nature Geosciences is from the Meteorological Monitoring Station (REMS), which was provided by Spain and includes a relative humidity sensor and a soil temperature sensor. The Curiosity spacecraft, which is a scientific laboratory for everything, investigates both the ancient environment and the modern environmental conditions in Gale Crater. The report also cites soil hydrogen measurements made by the Russian-made rover's Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument.
"We didn't detect salt water directly, but we calculated the possibility that it was in the air in Gale Crater for several nights during the measurement period." says Ashwin Vasada, of JPL, one of the authors of the report.
Curiosity is the first mission designed to measure relative humidity in the near-surface Martian atmosphere and ground temperature for all hours of the day and all seasons in one Martian year.
The relative humidity depends on the temperature of the air as well as the amount of water that has evaporated into it. According to Curiosity's measurements, the relative humidity ranges from half a percent in the summer in the afternoons, to 100% in the winter and autumn nights.
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After Obama bailed out the collapsing banks, and saved the auto industry, and ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and expanded health insurance. It seems that the next president will promote space exploration. Maybe in cooperation with China and Russia. It seems that they want to return to the moon and maybe to Mars as well.
Fraxelles.
The basic problem of the US in space exploration is that it has lost its vision. If they don't do it, the space agency will be another organization and a shame.
Safkan, everyone is talking about China. So America will continue to neglect the nuclear and space industries. Because in the end they will not be able to control the economy even though they will impose sanctions on all the brazen countries. Maybe it would be better to have less aircraft carriers, and more research and development.
Avi Cohen.
I have already said, as soon as NASA is looking for additional budgets, it "finds signs of life" to justify the requested budget.
As a matter of fact, there is no obstacle to having water trapped under the surface of Mars. There was water on Mars for the same reason that there is water on Earth. There is also a species imprisoned underground in Israel, it is known that there are huge amounts of water underground in the Negev. The difference between Mars and Kharetz is mainly that on Earth the water did not evaporate into space and on Mars it did (due to the weak gravitational force on the surface of Mars or other unknown reasons)
My father, Emek Gale, that's what I think the name is. Where formations were observed in the face of a sediment+ from a rock not typical for Mars, maybe the remains of a meteor? In addition to the signs of river channels. This unexpected place is located on the Red Equator - in addition to the brown equator, it will allow thawing of water, in light of the river channels this is reasonable.
Due to the zero air pressure, it seems that the boiling point of water is lower than the Earth. Maybe like in Everest, the water boils at 70 degrees. In the past, a phenomenon was observed of geysers that fly like a champagne cork and evaporate quickly, and are blocked again with ice. If people live on Mars, the number 1 problem will be the cosmic radiation.
Very interesting, recently there are many articles regarding extraterrestrial life...is it a coincidence, or is there a special interest on the site recently?
In any case, this is another small step in a very long way of searching for the existence of extraterrestrial life... In another article it was mentioned that there probably existed an ocean on Mars that covered most of the northern hemisphere of the planet. Does anyone know why they chose to land the NASA vehicle in the equatorial region?
It seems more logical to me to the north, and it is also mentioned here in the article.