A Martian enigma centuries in the making is being unraveled at last. Ever since Galileo first looked at Mars through a telescope in 1610, astronomers have been interested on non-usual markings on the Red Planet’s surface. Currently, with NASA’s Curiosity rover and recent satellite pictures , scientists have unlocked the puzzle of the planet’s mysterious “dark streaks”, and what they found is a tale of water, wind, and a surprisingly dynamic planet. Read on to get to know all details about this achievement.
Spiderwebs and streaks: Get to know new Red Planet surface’s new history
NASA’s Curiosity rover recently took pictures of a geologic structure named as “spiderwebs” that span miles across Mars. The boxwork ridges, some of which are just an inch tall, are the fossilized fingerprints of ancient groundwater.
“The data and pictures being returned are already raising new questions related to how the Martian surface was changing billions of years ago,” NASA said in a press release.
The ridges carried out as water flowed into crevices, depositing minerals that hardened and turned into resistant to erosion, even at the same time Martian winds stripped away softer rock.
However, it doesn’t end there. Orbital high-resolution pictures presented two kinds of dark streaks: long-term “slope streaks” and seasonal “recurring slope lineae” (RSLs). The former are present for years, and the latter reappear seasonally in the summer. Scientists exposed for decades whether these streaks showes flowing water or not.
A planet whose shape is based on water, dust, and time
The “spiderweb” patterns, visible from space, blanket Mount Sharp and other terrain. NASA reports that “The Red Planet once had rivers, lakes, and maybe even an ocean. Although scientists don’t know why, its water at some point vanished and the planet transformed into the cold desert it is at this time.”
Water flowing underground shaped the crisscrossing ridges by leaving behind minerals in crevices, which then hardened. Wind eroded the softer rock over millennia, leaving the tough mineral networks exposed. Interestingly, the patterns of boxwork show that even during this drying, there was still water below, creating the variations visible today.
The mystery of dark streaks: Traveling dust with no
For years, dark streaks running down Martian slopes were taken to be the result of salty water seeping from the ground surface. Nevertheless, in a recent investigation using over 86,000 high-definition pictures and machine learning analysis, that theory has been turned on its head.
Valentin Bickel, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bern, said, “Once we had this map of the world, we could then cross-match it with databases and catalogs of other variables such as temperature, wind speed, water content, frequency of rockslides and others. And then we could seek correlations on hundreds of thousands of cases to determine under what conditions these features do occur.”
The streaks happen most frequently in dry, hot environments next to the equator and tend to occur by the time the winds are strong. The investigation inspected these characteristic but found no evidence of water; in addition, the model tends dry formation mechanisms, as explains the Brown University postdoctoral investigator associate Adomas Valantinas. The streaks would then seem to be a consequence of thin layers of dust composed of fine-grained materials sliding down slopes caused by wind, minor earthquakes, or meteoroid impact.
Mars remains an active planet
This recent knowledge does not prove that Mars is lifeless or inactive. Instead, the planet’s surface is shape again even nowadays by wind, dust, and sporadic impacts. The Curiosity rover keeps to burrow into bedrock, looking for organic molecules and evidence of Mars’ past wetness. Investigators have just discovered a stretch of the mineral siderite, which suggests Mars once supported life.
The detection of these streaks and patterns serves to remind us that Mars is world that keeps active, not a lifeless desert. Each new picture and information point brings us closer to knowing about the Red Planet’s past—and about its potential for future exploration.