SUNDAY READ

Pune Miror, Pune, October 4, 2015 Pp.20

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2015

www.punemirror.in

CANT DRINK AT
THE MARS BAR YET
Our response to news of water on the red planet needs to be a little more down to earth

Vasudevan Mukunth
punemirror.feeback@gmail.com
TWEET@ThePuneMirror

very deep sea dive, every

satellite into orbit around
Earth, every next step into
the densest jungles reveals
to us one more thing about
our planet that we didnt know
before. When our own home has
so much left to teach us, should
we be surprised that Mars, a whole
different world, can show us up
for how much we still dont
know? A little scratch on the surface has challenged our best scientists taking on the adventure of
unravelling Mars history and
future will keep us journeying for
many decades. Even now, after
four years of intense searching,
NASA has just claimed to find
signs of liquid water on Mars.
Some time in its past, a fifth of
the Martian surface was thought
to be covered in oceans, kilometres deep, before something happened for all that liquid to disappear. In time, what was also
thought to be a thicker atmosphere dissipated, supposedly leaking away into space through a
series of chemical reactions, leaving Mars to be the desolate land it
is today. These are two of the
more important mysteries that
scientists want to understand for
signs of whether something similar could happen on Earth as well
as to make sense of our immediate
planetary neighbourhood.
Because with large oceans of
liquid water and an atmosphere
rich in gases like oxygen, Mars
couldve harboured life at least
life that resembled the life that
exists on Earth. Imagine how exciting that would be, to find out that
at some point, there was someone

next door. For this, many of the

worlds space-faring nations have
spent billions building, launching
and operating orbiters, satellites
that get into orbit around Mars
and study the atmosphere and surface properties; landers that drop
down on the surface; rovers, the
little cars loaded with science
instruments moving around, drilling into rocks, probing the dust.
On September 28, NASA
announced that it had found evidence of liquid water flowing on
Mars. This is a deceptively ambiguous statement for many reasons.
Foremost is that NASA has been
announcing similar news since the
2000s because there are many ways
to infer the signs of liquid water,
but the only thing that will tell us
for sure if theres liquid water on
Mars is if we spot liquid water itself.
This hasnt happened yet.
Instead, a team of scientists
working with data from the NASA
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
(MRO) had found channels less
than 5 metres wide and some 100
metres long carved on some of the
craters and hills on Mars. They
were first spotted in 2011 by the
same team led by Lujendra
Ojha, a student at Georgia Tech
and dubbed recurring slope line
(RSL). The RSLs became more pronounced, longer and wider and
better visible in satellite imagery,
during warmer months and faded
when it was colder. That was the
first clue, that flowing water could
be carving them in the rock during Martian summers and then
freezing into ice over Martian
winters.
Earlier this year, Ojha & co used
a spectrometer on board the MRO
to see what was left behind in the
RSLs after the water had flowed
past (assuming it was water). A

spectrometer is a device that measures what wavelengths of light are

emanating from a source. Based on
the combination of wavelengths
coming from different sources, scientists then map the spectrometers readings to a database of
chemicals with the same spectral
signatures. So, the team found that
the RSLs contained deposits of
three: magnesium chlorate, magnesium perchlorate and sodium
perchlorate.
These salts are hygroscopic: they
absorb moisture from the atmosphere and form a briny solution in
which they dissolve very well. Over
time, the flowing brine would
deposit some of these salts in the
RSLs. In the spectral readings of
these depositions picked up by the
MRO, Ojha & co found that the
salts indeed contained signs of having been hydrated, pointing to the
presence of liquid water on Mars.
As important as this result is, it still
isnt the end of the quest. Scientists
still need to spot the liquid water
itself, and find out where its coming from because the Martian
atmosphere doesnt have enough
moisture to have been feeding the
RSLs. At the press conference on
September 28, NASA scientists said
they had some ideas but that none
of them were perfect.
Nonetheless, the space agency

hyped the results because the US

government, which funds NASAs
programs, has been tightening its
budget of late. By showing that its
instruments and scientists are able
to make wondrous discoveries on
Mars, NASA wants to please its
sponsors and secure more support.
However, such hype ends up misinforming the people and projects
a wrong image of the science at
work, especially when its wondrous enough that were achingly
close to finding liquid water.
Sometime in the next decade,
NASA hopes to send astronauts to
Mars and if there is a way for
them to produce potable water on
the red planet, it would raise hopes
for a permanent human settlement
there. The discovery would also
give astronomers a better picture
of Mars water cycle, its journey
from reservoirs to basins, and how
it couldve affected the planets
atmosphere.
Finding water would also boost
the chances of finding signs of
life. Various investigations have
found that traces of methane
appear and disappear from the
Martian atmosphere. Methane is
an unstable gas and one way to
explain its coming and going is
presupposing the existence of
microbial life. On Earth, a lot of
the atmospheric methane origi-

nates from various lifeforms, so

continuing to study the atmosphere is important because its a
big part of the puzzle of finding
Martian life. ISROs Mars Orbiter
Mission is a part of this quest, too.
Its science objectives are to study
the minerals on Mars surface,
observe how methane and carbon
dioxide levels change, and probe
the upper atmosphere.
But if at any time humankind
finds that life exists on Mars, it
wont be easy to study them up
close. Why? Because its important
not to contaminate Mars with life
from Earth. If the two mix, we
might not be able to tell the difference, or we could tamper with the
evolution of Mars in a way it was
not supposed to be. It may even
lead to the residual Martian life
being killed off. In fact, the worlds
space-faring nations are prevented
from intimately exploring places
on Mars where alien life could exist
by the Outer Space Treaty, an international agreement signed in 1967.
All future landers and rovers on
Mars no matter who sends them,
NASA or ISRO have to abide by
this treaty and not land where
Martian life might be thriving.
Yet these are trivial impediments to humankinds propensity
for exploration. Even if weve
always been alone in this universe,
there are and we know there will
always be enough wonders out
there than can be conceived of in
our sciences and that can prepare
us for future interstellar sojourns.
But the important thing will
always be to respect the careful
jaunt of science and not be waylaid by hype or ignorance into losing our way. If theres something
out there, we will find it.
The writer is science
editor, The Wire.

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