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Source of water found on Mars: Scientists have achieved a major success in the process of settling humans on another planet. For a long time, there has been a search for water and an environment suitable for humans on Mars. In this sequence, the spacecraft of the European Space Agency (ECA) has detected frozen water (Water Frost) on the huge Tharsis volcanoes near the equator of the Red Planet, while this area is considered to be very hot. The freezing of water here changes our preconceptions about the atmosphere of Mars. Scientists believe that the peaks of the mountains here are usually not colder than the plains, but moist air can condense and turn into ice, as happens on Earth.
This frost has been discovered for the first time by ESA. ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) saw it above the huge Olympus Mons volcano. It is about three times the height of Mount Everest and is the highest mountain in the solar system. As soon as TGO came to know about the water frost on Olympus, it started taking pictures of many other areas of Mars one after the other, which proved fruitful. It has discovered water frost here.
Brown University researcher Adomas Valentinas, who was involved in this discovery, initially discovered this during his PhD at the University of Bern. He said, ‘We thought that it is impossible for frost (freezing of water) to form around the equator of Mars, because there is very strong sunlight and thin atmosphere here, due to which the temperature on the mountains remains very high.
The volcano’s caldera is full of frost.
Despite being only about one-hundredth of a millimetre, or the width of a human hair, these frozen forms of water cover a vast portion of the volcano’s summit caldera. During the cold season on Mars, about 150,000 tonnes of water from the ground freezes into ice. The amount of water found here is equivalent to the size of 60 Olympic arena-sized swimming pools on Earth.
Just like on Earth, the frost lasts for a few hours after sunrise and then evaporates during the day. Researchers believe this is only possible if there are “extraordinary processes” that create a human-friendly microclimate in the volcano’s caldera. Researchers believe winds move up the slopes, bringing relatively moist air that condenses and freezes as frost. Cloud formation has been observed on Mars, but this process suggests the caldera is a cold region, much like our Earth.
Tag: Science News, space, Space exploration
first published : June 14, 2024, 4:14 pm IST
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