Some scientists theorize that the red planet may have once had more oxygen in its atmosphere after NASA's Mars rovers found minerals in rocks.
The scientists said that the minerals needed abundant water and strong oxidizing conditions. Scientists used lessons from Earth's geologic record to conclude that Mars had experienced periodic increases in atmospheric oxygen before falling to its current low levels.
A new study shows that this view is wrong.
Scientists found that under Mars-like conditions, it is possible to form manganese oxides. The scientists showed that the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere on ancient Mars wouldn't be able to oxidize manganese.
Jeffrey Catalano, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts and Sciences, is the author of the study. Catalano is a faculty member at the center.
The first author of the study was a graduate student at Washington University who was working as a research associate at the time.
Mars has a lot of the elements chlorine and bromine. Catalano said that halogens occur on Mars in forms different from on the Earth, and that they would be important to the fate of manganese.
They used chlorate and bromate to oxidize manganese in water samples that they made to recreate fluids on the Mars surface in the ancient past.
The reactions seen during chlorination of drinking water inspired us. It is necessary to apply knowledge gained from seemingly unrelated fields of science and engineering in order to understand other planets.
The scientists found that halogens were able to convert dissolved manganese into oxide minerals thousands of times faster than oxygen. Under the weakly acidic conditions that scientists believe were found on the surface of early Mars, bromate produces more than any other oxidant. Oxygen is unable to form manganese oxides under a lot of these conditions.
The involvement of oxygen by definition does not necessitateOxidation. There are viable oxidants on Mars that can explain why the red planet is red. We didn't have a viable alternative to oxygen that could explain why manganese oxides were formed.
An important driver of ongoing research by NASA and the European Space Agency is the result of the new results.
There is no reason to believe that there was any life in the past.
There are life forms that don't need oxygen. I don't think of it as a setback to habitability, only that there was probably no oxygen-based life forms.
The organisms that thrive in the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea on Earth could do well on Mars.
In order to have the correct and full understanding of the geological environments on these planetary bodies, we need more experiments conducted in diverse geochemical conditions that are more relevant to specific planets. We can't generalize the observations made on a single planet to understand a different planet.
There is more information about the formation of manganese oxides on early Mars.
Journal information: Nature Geoscience
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