A 600 million year drought wiped out life on Mars

This is according to a study by a team from Imperial College London, whose members participated in the Phoenix mission and used the microscope on the spacecraft to analyze the particles

Mars was completely dry for over 600 million years. This form made it too hostile to any possible form of life to survive on the planet's surface. This is according to a study by researchers from Imperial College London, who analyzed the Martian soil data. The group, led by Dr. Tom Pike from Imperial College, will present the findings tomorrow, February 7, at the European Space Agency conference.

The researchers spent three years analyzing data on the Martian soil collected during NASA's 2008 Phoenix mission to Mars. Phoenix landed in the northern Arctic looking for signs of habitats and analyzing ice and soil on the surface.

The results of the analysis at the Phoenix landing site raise the possibility that Mars was completely dry for hundreds of millions of years, despite the fact that it has ice today and the fact that previous studies have shown that Mars was once warmer and wetter in its early history over 3 billion years ago. The team also estimated that the Martian soil has been exposed to liquid water for a maximum of 5,000 years since the planet's formation billions of years ago. They also found that the soil of Mars and the moon formed under the same dry conditions.

Satellite photographs and previous studies have proven that Martian soil is uniform across the entire planet, therefore they concluded that the findings from the Phoenix landing site are relevant to all of Mars. This means that life had a very short time to grow roots on the surface.
Dr. Pike, from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Imperial College who was the principal investigator of the article published in the journal Geophysical Research explained:

"We found that despite the wide distribution of water ice, Mars experienced a super-drought that could have continued for hundreds of millions of years. We believe that the Mars we know today is in stark contrast to its early history, which was a time when it was warm and wet and suitable for life. Future NASA missions" A and the European Space Agency will be required to dig deeper in search of evidence of life that might have found refuge underground."

During the Phoenix mission, Dr. Pike and his team were one of 24 teams that sat at the Control Center at the University of Arizona, operating the laboratories inside the lander. They analyzed soil samples dug up by the robotic arm using an optical microscope to image the large particles, and an atomic force microscope to Produce a three-dimensional visualization of the surface of the particles that are 100 microns in size since completion The mission They were busy cataloging the size of individual particles to better understand the history of the Martian soil.

In the study, the researchers looked for microscopic clay particles formed when rock is broken by water. Such particles are important markers of the connection between the liquid water and the soil and they form a distinguishable population of grains. The team found no such markers. They concluded that even if the few particles they saw in the sample were clay particles, they made up less than 0.1% of the total soil volume in the samples. On Earth, such clay constitutes 50% of the total soil content, so this figure shows the very dry history of the soil.

Such a rate indicates an exposure of no more than 5,000 years to water, if you compare it to the rate of clay crystallization in the earth's rocks. The team also found additional evidence supporting the idea that Martian soil has been dry throughout the planet's history by comparing soil samples from Mars, Earth and the Moon. The researchers concluded that the soil was formed in similar ways on Mars and the Moon because they were able to match the size distribution of the soil particles. On Mars, wind and meteorites broke the soil into smaller particles. On the Moon, meteorite impacts broke up the rocks and turned them into soil, because there is no flowing water or atmosphere to erode the particles.

to the notice of the researchers