REAL LIFE NEWS: SO WAS THERE RUNNING WATER ON MARS, OR NOT?
by Hazed
New evidence from the Curiosity rover has puzzled scientists by seeming to rule out the presence of running water on Mars in the past – despite the fact that other evidence shows that water did once flow.
The problem is that so far no carbon dioxide has been found on the surface, despite Curiosity trundling across Mars for the past five years, examining rocks.
This seems to contradict current thinking, which is that about 3.8 billion years ago Mars had running water on the surface. Since the Sun wasn’t strong enough to warm the planet to a level where liquid water could form, scientists thought that there was enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to heat the surface by a greenhouse effect.
That would mean that Martian rocks would be studded with carbonate material. But despite its drilling activities, Curiosity hasn’t found any.
“We've been particularly struck with the absence of carbonate minerals in sedimentary rock the rover has examined," said Thomas Bristow of NASA's Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, California. "It would be really hard to get liquid water even if there were a hundred times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than what the mineral evidence in the rock tells us."
It’s a mystery!
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/07/curiosity_mars_climate_change/
