Mars Exploration News  
Early Mars: Warm Enough to Melt Water?

"The channel at the bottom of Nanedi Vallis is only about 100 feet across," says Kasting. "It took millions of years of constant running water to carve the Grand Canyon. It would take a similar time on Mars."

Denver - Feb 17, 2003
While some researchers believe that only asteroid collisions made Mars warm enough to have running rivers, a Penn State researcher believes the planet had to be continuously warmer to form Mars' deep valleys, but he does not know how the planet warmed up.

Some recent research suggests that early Mars was cold most of the time and warmed up only when objects impacted the planet. The impacts would warm the atmosphere and melt water trapped in underground and surface ice, causing rivers to flow and cutting the valleys that rival Arizona's Grand Canyon.

"I do not think this is right," said Dr. James F. Kasting, distinguished professor of geosciences and meteorology. "I do not think there was enough time involved to form the types of features that we see on the Martian landscape."

Kasting believes that a greenhouse effect warmed the planet. However, he has calculated that a carbon dioxide and water greenhouse would not have warmed the planet above the freezing point of water. On Mars, before enough carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere to warm things up, the carbon dioxide would condense into dry ice clouds and eventually there would be ice caps.

"It does not seem possible to get above freezing with gaseous carbon dioxide and water," he told attendees at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science today (Feb. 14) in Denver.

Which is why some researchers think the planet was never warm. But, according to Kasting, features like Nanedi Vallis, which is a half-mile to over a mile wide in places and over a half mile deep, could not be made during the short time rivers would run after an impact.

"The channel at the bottom of Nanedi Vallis is only about 100 feet across," says Kasting. "It took millions of years of constant running water to carve the Grand Canyon. It would take a similar time on Mars."

One possible solution is that other greenhouse gases were in play in the Martian atmosphere. Methane would be a good candidate, but most sources of methane on Earth are biological. Today's sources of methane are methanogenic bacteria in ruminant animals and rice paddies, but in the pre-oxygen atmosphere of the past, methanobacteria could have lived in many places.

"Hillary Justh, a graduate student in geosciences, ran a model of Mars with three atmospheres of carbon dioxide and a tenth of a percent of methane in the atmosphere," adds the Penn State researcher. "Because 3.8 billion years ago the solar luminosity was only 75 percent of what it is today, the model returned an average temperature of minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit."

This by itself would not have been enough to allow widespread liquid water.

However, the Martian surface could have received 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit additional warming from the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide ice clouds.

This might have allowed at least the tropics to remain above freezing.

One problem with methane-producing bacteria is that the ones we know here on Earth, both from the fossil record and today, prefer warm environments.

Some geologic processes generate methane, but only in small amounts. These process require water and ultramafic rocks to form serpentine rocks with methane as a by-product. This process occurs at mid-ocean ridges on Earth and can also occur during asteroid collisions that excavate large amounts of mantle material.

"We do not really know much about how plate tectonics works on Mars, and even if we did, it is doubtful that enough methane could be generated to create the necessary greenhouse," says Kasting. "Mars probably did need a biological source of methane to form a planet-warming greenhouse."

Researchers think that Mars has a supply of water, which is required for all terrestrial life. They also think that volcanic activity on Mars produced a tenth of a percent or so of hydrogen and substantial amounts of carbon dioxide, the two compounds that methanobacteria on Earth need to produce methane. Evidence of these methanobacteria could be found in subsurface fossils or, the bacteria could still be there today.

"What we need to do is go and take samples," said Kasting, a member of Penn State's NASA-sponsored Astrobiology Research Center.

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission, scheduled to launch later this year, will almost do that. Scheduled to have two fully capable robotic vehicles like the Sojourner, it will sample soils looking for signs of life.

However, while the science objectives of the rover missions are to determine if water was present on Mars and whether there are conditions favorable to the preservation of evidence for ancient life, the mission will not return samples to Earth. The first NASA sample-return mission is scheduled for 2020 or later.

Community
Email This Article
Comment On This Article

Related Links
SpaceDaily
Search SpaceDaily
Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express
Mars News and Information at MarsDaily.com
Lunar Dreams and more



Memory Foam Mattress Review
Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily
XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News


Spirit Heading To 'Home Plate'
Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 09, 2006
Last week Spirit completed robotic-arm work on "El Dorado." The rover used all three of its spectrometers plus the microscopic imager for readings over the New Year's weekend.











  • Moon's Early History May Have Been Interrupted By Big Burp
  • Memories Of Orange Rock From The Lunar Age
  • Taos Goes Lunar With International Talkfest
  • Moon and Earth Formed out of Identical Material

  • Artemis Finally Reaches Operational Orbit
  • Lord Sainsbury Launches Three-Year Strategy For UK Space
  • Artemis Nearly There
  • Rosetta: A Comet Ride To Solve Planetary Mysteries

  • Planetary Scientists Applaud President's FY04 Budget Proposal
  • New Moons Found Around Neptune
  • Novel Way To Look For Comets Beyond Neptune
  • First Neptune Trojan Discovered

  • RocketCam to Capture Flight of Wright Flyer Replica
  • Galileo Back In Operational Mode After Amalthea Standby
  • Keck Watches Io Adapt
  • Galileo Flirts With Amalthea But Zapped By Jupiter On The Final Pass



  • Titan's Methane Clouds Make For A View To Behold
  • Saturn's Moon Titan May Hold Clues To Origin Of Life
  • Cassini Sights Saturn and Titan
  • Titan's Bizarre Landscape Shaped More by Internal Heat Than Erosion

  • AeroAstro Completes Radio Compatibility Testing With Deep Space Network
  • Space Link Extension Transfer Services
  • UC Riverside Scientists Synthesize New Porous Materials
  • The Pull of HyperGravity

  • The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2006 - SpaceDaily.AFP and UPI Wire Stories are copyright Agence France-Presse and United Press International. ESA PortalReports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additionalcopyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by SpaceDaily on any Web page published or hosted by SpaceDaily. Privacy Statement