Three and a half billion years ago Mars used to have rivers and lakes , but the Sun was a fate dimmer that it is today , so it should n’t have been warm enough for them . Scientists thought the Red Planet must have been in full glasshouse - musical mode , with slew of C dioxide warm up its otherwise frigid air .
But NASA ’s Curiosity has delivered a carbon conundrum for astronomer . The bird of passage is studying the seam of an ancient lake and it was n’t able to find any trace of carbonate minerals , paint a picture that the air was quite destitute of carbon dioxide . These results are publish in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
" We ’ve been particularly discover by the absence of carbonate minerals in sedimentary rock the rover has examined , " say Thomas Bristow from NASA ’s Ames Research Center in astatement . " It would be really concentrated to get liquid piss even if there were a hundred times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than what the mineral grounds in the rock tells us . "
Curiosity can identify carbonates even if they make up just a few percent of the rocks , but has failed to make any definitive espial – quite the opposite of what the research worker were expect . When carbonate were betray to be seen from orbit , planetary scientists suggested that they might have been bury , but the new data prove that Mars could n’t have been kept warm by carbon dioxide .
“ The Curiosity results fetch the paradox to a focus . This is the first time we ’ve contain for carbonate on the ground in a rock and roll we be intimate form from sediment deposited under pee , ” lend Bristow .
The squad pop the question both different global and local scenarios . For lesson , the ancient lake that Curiosity is exploring ( now known as Gale Crater ) might have been covered in methamphetamine , although they have not find any evidence supporting this explanation .
Global explanations require a revolutionary afterthought of the young Mars atmospheric model . Carbon dioxide and H were considered the major players in the primordial atmospheric state of the Red Planet , but the data does n’t indorse this .
Four billion years ago , the Sun was emitting only 70 per centum of the twinkle it emit today . The conditions of the sublunary planets of the Solar System are close link to the evolution of our Sun , so it ’s complicated enough to explain how limpid water was possibleon Earth , let alone Mars .
