Life on Mars, An exploration & Evidence
Life on Mars, An exploration & Evidence
Let’s begin our journey to the mysterious red rock; Things to be taken are determination and will power; Time to off space and bye to earth.
The surface of modern Mars is a parched memory of water. What little remains of the life-giving liquid trickle from salty seasonal seeps, languishes in pockets as underground lakes, or sits frozen in sheets of ice. Yet the planet’s rusty rocks record a past flush with water; deep valleys carve through a landscape speckled with dry lake beds, alluvial fans, and smooth river pebbles. While scientists have long thought the planet’s warm and wet period was relatively brief and these rivers may have stuck around for much longer than previously thought.
Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, has been a source of intrigue throughout human history. Recent NASA exploratory expeditions revealed some of the planet’s biggest mysteries. This video explains what makes Mars so different from Earth and what would happen if humans lived there. According to the new studies, these ancient channels are wider than similar channels on Earth today. What’s more, water rushed through these hefty features at places around the globe between 3.4 and 2 billion years ago. That’s late in Mars’s wet history, a period when many scientists believe the red planet was already desiccating.
How about knowing the history of water bodies on Mars?
“The traditional story of Mars’s climate history is that it used to be warm and wet, and now it’s cold and dry. But the evidence suggests that Mars’s climate evolution is more complicated. The mention of water on Mars inevitably draws excitement, since where there was water, there might also have been living as we know it. But don’t start dreaming up names for fossil Martians quite yet. Many questions remain about what was going on during this extended period of Mars’s past and how rivers could fill under the changing conditions.
In past climates, Mars’s many ancient impact craters filled with ice, which grows wrinkled and cracked as the planet periodically warms and cools. Holden crater in the southern Margaritifer Terra region has many telltale signs of past water, such as widespread fine sediment layers occasionally mixed with clay, a common substance formed as rock weathers. Further analysis revealed that a seasonal flow of salty water may be painting these dark lines on Mars’s surface.
Oops! What has happened to those water molecules?
While Mars’ current atmosphere is too meager to trap much heat from the sun, many scientists agree that a thicker version likely once blanketed the red planet and fostered a wetter world. Even then, Mars was no tropical escape. The ancient sun was 25 to 30 percent weaker than it is today, which means that much less solar radiation warmed Mars’s rocky terrain. Things were always kind of right at the edge of being able to have water flowing across the surface.
A few factors could’ve helped ease this liquid conundrum. On Earth, our churning outer core whips up a protective magnetic field that keeps our relatively thick atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind. The same was likely true for early Mars. And perhaps the mix of gasses differed from that in Mars’s current atmosphere. For instance, some experts suggest that erupting volcanoes were once pumping greenhouse gasses into the Martian sky. However it happened, this warm and wet period didn’t last. The ancient atmosphere seems to have eroded away, and with it went many of the Martian lakes and rivers. The researchers initially thought that after this time, as rivers lingered mostly in lower altitudes, the rushing waters also slowed to a trickle.
Evidence that proved the presence of water bodies
Bolstered by the stunning resolution of Mars-orbiting instruments like the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), the researchers analyzed the dimensions of more than 200 ancient riverbeds. Based on the channels’ sizes, meandering size, and the relative ages of the surrounding terrain, the team found what seems to be a curiously persistent and late period of liquid runoff.
What was driving this flow at such an unexpected time remains unclear. Some researchers are investigating whether water-ice clouds could flourish in low atmospheric pressures. Such clouds still linger above Mars today, and if they were thicker, they might trap enough heat to melt snow and ice. Or perhaps the dates of river formation are wrong, which would mean the channels formed during a more ancient time when a thicker atmosphere heated the Martian snowpack.
Scientists may soon get even more clues: The Mars 2020 rover is slated to land in Jezero crater, which contains one of these late-stage river deltas. That rover can take pictures of the sediments, which would help scientists determine how much water poured into the crater. But the only definitive, albeit unrealistic, solution is to send an orbiter back billions of years to check out the red planet’s churning surface. That would destroy all the controversy and interest in trying to piece it together from the sparse evidence we have at the present time. So science would be less interesting.
Is life on mars really possible? How to reengineer mars to have a sustainable life?
People on earth like to talk a lot about colonizing Mars. But what if it had already happened and the first humans had already settled down on the Red Planet? What would life on Mars look like? Would we be able to live on the surface or have to hide underground from all the solar radiation that Mars gets exposed to? Would we be able to terraform it?
This is what if and here’s what would happen if we lived on Mars, Ever felt like getting off this planet. Well, consider Mars fourth Rock from the Sun, it can be as close as fifty-six million kilometers away. It can also be as far as 401 million kilometers away. Even if you jumped into the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth getting there would take anywhere from 40 days to nine and a half months depending on the position of the planets and After all that time spent in space you’d finally see dry and lifeless Mars on the horizon.
Would you be able to survive there? What would you need to survive on Mars anyway? First off you’d have to figure out how to produce oxygen to breathe. The Martian atmosphere is very thin and it’s 95% carbon dioxide. You wouldn’t be able to just bring the oxygen you need to survive. But you could extract it from the carbon dioxide with machines like NASA’s moxie not only would that provide you and other Martian settlers with breathable air, but also supply you with liquid oxygen propellant. That’s the stuff you’d need to lift a rocket off Mars in case you decide to return to Earth.
There’s no fertile soil on Mars to grow food in instead you’d use hydroponics cultivating your crops in a mineral and nutrient solution no soil required of Course without running water on the surface. Your colony would only be able to grow 20% of the food. you’d need the rest of it then, you’d have shipped in from Earth. But don’t expect fresh meat all your food would come dried. LOL. Along with the other settlers, you’d probably live in inflatable pressurized buildings. But it’s more likely that you’d go underground because Mars has no global geomagnetic field and since its atmosphere is so thin Radiation levels in orbit above Mars are two and a half times higher than at the International Space Station. That’s too much solar radiation for humans to bear forget about Sun Tanning, the Sun would appear just half as big as it does from Earth and If you want to go outside and return alive;
You’d need a spacesuit to make up for the near absent atmospheric pressure and to block radiation your suit would also keep you warm; Which is important because temperatures on Mars are very low. The coldest winter on Earth is a paradise compared to the average martian winter temperatures would be as low as 55 degrees below zero even colder at the poles, where the temperatures can drop to freezing of -153 degrees.
A day on Mars is just 40 minutes longer than a day on earth. A year on Mars would be almost twice as long. Though if you lived in the northern hemisphere, you’d enjoy seven months of spring and six months of summer. Then, there would be five-month-long autumn and another four months of winter. And not only are the temperatures their low, but they can also change dramatically within a week.
These variations often result in powerful dust storms. They wouldn’t harm you but they’d clog all your electronics. Remember too, that the gravity on Mars is about one-third of Earth’s you’d need to learn how to walk again.
Still, want to move to the Red Planet? Well, your best bet is to wait until the first human colonies head there to terraform the planet to make it just like the one, they came from. They’d import ammonia ice from the atmospheres of other planets to heat Mars up a little. The heat would convert the dry ice at the Martian North Pole into gas and give the planet an atmosphere still unbreathable for us. But at least it would be enough to create atmospheric pressure so that you could finally take off your spacesuit.
Then, they’d extract water from the vast reserves of water ice locked beneath Mars. A surface water vapor would make the atmosphere thicker and thicker eventually, you’d see it raining and snowing on Mars and After maybe a thousand years, there’d be enough oxygen for humans to breathe. The planet reengineering would be complete. Is Living on mars something you’d like to try or would you rather preserve what we have here on earth?
