Blue Skies Over Pluto And A Lakeside Home On Mars | IFLScience

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Blue Skies Over Pluto And A Lakeside Home

On Mars
October 10, 2015 | by Monica Grady

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Environment

photo credit: A beautiful day on Pluto w ith clear blue skies. NASA

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The solar system beyond Earth is often depicted as a dark, hostile and barren place where you
absolutely wouldnt want to get stranded. But the latest results from a pair of intrepid explorers
have once again confounded the expectations of planetary scientists. They reveal blue skies
over Pluto and an ancient, tranquil lake on Mars that could have supported life.

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This time last year, our best picture of Pluto was a grey, fuzzy undistinguished blob with no
redeeming features. What a difference a 15 minute fly-by makes.

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Since the New Horizons mission started returning data in July, we have seen amazing
landscapes, including a vast and smooth icy plain bordered by jumbled blocks of ice and rock,
as well as patterned ground that has been described as having a texture like a snakeskin.

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Snakeskin image: textured mountains on Pluto, informally named the Tartarus Dorsa. NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

We have seen ripples and ridges, things that look like mosaics of plates of ice and things that
look like river valleys. And now we have learnt that these features all lie below a blue sky. Does
this remind you of somewhere else? We too are enveloped in a thin blue coat. The colour of
our sky, and Plutos, is caused by the same mechanism the scattering of light by small
particles in the atmosphere, with the main constituent being nitrogen.
But there the similarities end. For a start, Earths atmosphere is about 100,000 times as dense
as Plutos, and its second highest component is oxygen. On Pluto, nitrogen is accompanied by
methane, and it is probable that the particles which scatter light are a group of molecules called
tholins. These are formed when ultraviolet radiation (from the sun) breaks up molecules (like
nitrogen and methane), which then react together, producing more complex molecules.
Whats really interesting about tholins (which are also present in the atmosphere of Saturns
giant planet Titan) is that they can keep reacting with newly broken-up molecules, growing
larger and larger. They may become coated with ice, and then fall as snow or hail onto Plutos
surface. Now Pluto is far too cold for much more to happen to these molecules but in a

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Blue Skies Over Pluto And A Lakeside Home On Mars | IFLScience

13/10/2015

warmer environment, say, to take a planet at random, the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago,
maybe they could be the organic seed that eventually led to biology? Unfortunately Pluto is
not the best candidate for extra terrestrial life. That spot belongs to Mars.

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That brings me to the lakeside or at least, the rocks and sediments left behind when a lake
evaporated away. We heard only last week that observations of gullies on Mars implied that
liquid water might still be present. This week, in a very detailed article in the journal Science,
NASA scientists describe the geology of Gale crater, which is being explored by the Curiosity
rover.

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The area explored by the Curiosity rover: A layer of sedimentary rocks in the foreground dip towards the base of Mount
Sharp. NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Here, water was present some 3 and a half billion years ago, forming a lake within an impact
crater. The rims of the crater were eroded by a combination of wind and rivers, which carried
the sediment into the crater, gradually building up to fill it completely. The sediments draped
over the central part of the crater, to form the mountain called Mount Sharp.
The lake was probably episodic, growing and shrinking with changes in climate. Some of the
sediments are more like those which would be characteristic of a delta, recording times when
the lake was drying up, showing river deposits fanning out across an exposed surface, rather
than settling out into deeper water. What is most interesting about the findings (as well as the
amazing images of sedimentary rocks) is that there are no signs of a cold climate.
There is no evidence of glaciation. No frost wedges (deep cracks produced during freeze/thaw
episodes) or glacial dropstones (rocks transported by a glacier, then dropped as the glacier
or iceberg traverses the lake). All there is is 75 metres of rock that represent deposition of
sediment into a substantial body of standing water water that must have been present for
hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. So what was happening on Mars during this
period?

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The authors point out that, at the time, Mars axial tilt was higher than it is at present. Back
then it was tilted more towards the Sun, resulting in greater swings in temperature between
seasons. How thick was the atmosphere? Was there a greater volume of volatiles, produced
by increased volcanic activity, contributing to a warmer climate?
The concluding sentence of the article summarises how these findings continue to keep Mars
as the hot favourite for extraterrestrial life: Our results show that water pooled there, in
surface and subsurface reservoirs, for a geologically and perhaps biologically relevant period of
time.
If we link this sentence with the observation that water might still be present in sub-surface
brines then maybe Mars isnt quite so dead after all and the Martian might have had to
battle potato blight as well as everything else.

Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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