A team led by scientists at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has calculated that if liquid water exists on Mars, the planet could contain more oxygen than previously thought.
Published in the Nature journal, the study was led by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Using atmospheric models to test how oxygen might react in the water underneath the Red Planet’s surface, the team found evidence to suggest that the life-sustaining chemical element could be present to a degree higher than expected.
“Even at the limits of the uncertainties, our findings suggest that there can be near-surface environments on Mars with sufficient O2 available for aerobic microbes to breathe,” the study states.
The existence of liquid water on Mars is not a given. Even if it is there, researchers have long dismissed the idea that it might be oxygenated, given that Mars’s atmosphere is about 160 times thinner than that of Earth and is mostly carbon dioxide.
“Oxygen is a key ingredient when determining the habitability of an environment, but it is relatively scarce on Mars,” said Woody Fischer, a professor at Caltech. “Nobody ever thought that the concentrations of dissolved oxygen needed for aerobic respiration could theoretically exist on Mars,” said Vlada Stamenkovic, from JPL, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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