NASA’s long-time motto for exploring Mars has been “Follow the water.” That has changed some in recent years, as the presence of long-ago H2O has been confirmed in many locales around the planet. Moving on, the motto today is more “Follow the organics” — the carbon-based building blocks of life — in the search for habitable environments and maybe signs of ancient life.
But water remains crucial to any discussion of habitability on Mars, and so a new set of global water maps from the European Space Agency, ten years in the making, is both useful and intriguing.
Specifically, the map shows the locations and abundances of these aqueous minerals — rocks that have been chemically altered by the action of water in the past, and have typically been transformed into clays and salts.
And the message that the maps deliver, said planetary scientist John Carter, is that these hydrated minerals are common across many parts of the planet.
Ten years ago, planetary scientists knew of around 1, 000 water-altered outcrops on Mars, he said. This made them interesting as geological oddities.
But the new map has reversed the situation, revealing hundreds of thousands of such areas in the oldest parts of the planet.
“This work has now established that when you are studying the ancient terrains in detail, not seeing these minerals is actually the oddity,” says Carter, an assistant professor at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) in France.
Now, Carter said in a release, the big question is whether the water was persistent or confined to shorter, more intense episodes. While not yet providing a definitive answer, the new results certainly give researchers a better tool for pursuing the answer.
“I think we have collectively oversimplified Mars,” says Carter, who was lead author in a paper published in the journal Icarus.
He explained that planetary scientists have tended to think that only a few types of clay minerals on Mars were created during its wet period — roughly 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago — then as the water gradually dried up salts were produced across the planet.