The secret whispered in the ear of President Clinton in ’96 he is finally It was confirmed yesterday by NASA during a press conference announced sensationally titled “The Mystery of Mars is solved.” Water is abundant: in anticipation of the research director of NASA’s Mars Michael Meyer amounts to one million cubic meters, spread out over a very large surface. The composition and origin are still to be discovered, but the mere idea of his presence raises the centennial dream that man will one day live on the red planet, and that can be transplanted forms of biological life that are needed to survive away from Earth.
PRIME MISSIONS
We have known for many years that Mars had hosted in geologic time huge amounts of water, such as to fill an ocean with a significant portion of the northern hemisphere of the planet. The first images sent to the central NASA Mariner missions in the 70s showed an area marked by gravel beds of rivers dried up, and depressions that once were lakes. We knew that the water had gathered in glaciers at the poles, before breaking up and disappear from the surface. Nine years ago photos taken from the mission Surveyer seemed to indicate a stream that flowed from the rock, and then mark the perimeter of some large boulders. In 2011 high-resolution images back to frame what everyone’s eyes seemed to be sweating water from the rock between the spring and autumn, but the experts were not able to confirm the discovery. Only last April we received the news sent by the rover Curiosity, currently operating on the Martian surface: the night forming small puddles of water on the ground, which then evaporated during the course of the day.
DECISIVE TEST
The litmus test is about the young geophysicist Lujendra Ojha at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, the same who first detected the phenomenon of oozing rock, clearing every reflex and every shade in a lab at the University of Arizona, images of a wall marked by deep flow channels. His research team has put on board the orbiting station MRO a spectrometer which has sounded the surface of a rock from the moment when the first traces of moisture dark have begun to mark it this year, up to the most recent days, in which the ‘shadow had reached its greatest extent. The instrument has detected an abundance of salt hydrates on the surface, which are a clear sign of the presence of water; a kind of ice, whose existence has been confirmed in at least four points of view: the craters Hale, Palikir and Horowitz, and the walls of a canyon large: the Coprate Chasma.
It remains to understand what gives rise to the water flow. It comes from a deep basin that is the way to the surface with the arrival of warmer weather, or has the effect of a condensing moisture in the thin layer of atmosphere surrounding the planet’s crust, and favored by the presence the salts that the catch?
We must be careful, now scientists say, not to hasten with our curiosity contamination with terrestrial microbes from the environment, thus erasing the signs likely survivors of a lifetime biological past, that its water and minerals could reveal. But now that we know that there will be difficult to resist the urge to pick up the liquid during a subsequent missions and bring it back to Earth so that it can be studied. A new phase of exploration is officially open.
Tuesday, 29 September 2015 10:37 – Last Updated: 10:42
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