In a puff of smoke, the NASA spacecraft Perseverance flew parachute into the dusty Mars in February 2021. For several years, a car would skate and take samples to try to answer David Bowie’s question in the 1971 book Life on Mars. it was not until 2030 that Nasa aimed to send samples back to Earth, but objects from Mars were already being explored – in the form of meteorites. In a new study published in Science Advances, a team of international researchers examined a nearly 1.3 billion-year-old meteorite using advanced scans.
“Since water is at the core of the question of whether life ever existed on Mars, we wanted to investigate how the meteorite reacts to water when it is still part of Mars’ rock,” explains Josefin Martell, a geologist at Lund University.
To answer the question of whether there is a large hydrothermal system, usually a good living space, the researchers used neutron and X-ray tomography. X-ray tomography is a common way to examine an object without damaging it. Neutron tomography was used because the neutron is very sensitive to hydrogen.This means that if a mineral contains hydrogen, it is possible to read it in three dimensions and see where the hydrogen is in the atmosphere. Hydrogen (H) has always been of interest when scientists study materials from Mars, because water (H2O) is a necessity for life as we know it. The results show that a small portion of the sample appeared to react with water, and therefore may not have been the major hydrothermal system that caused the change.
“The most likely explanation is that the reaction took place after a small accumulation of molten ice during a meteorite collision some 630 million years ago. , ”Says Josefin Martell.
MARS
Researchers hope that the results of their research will be useful when NASA returns original samples from Mars by about 2030, and there are many reasons to believe that current technology with neutron and X-ray tomography will be helpful if this happens.”It would be great if we had the opportunity to study these samples at the European Spallation Source, ESS research center in Lund, which would then be the world’s most powerful neutron source,” concludes Josefin Martell.
A team of researchers led by Lund University in Sweden investigated a meteorite from Mars using neutron and X-ray tomography. The technology, which was likely to be used when NASA tested samples of Red Planet in 2030, showed that the meteorite had a limited exposure to water, thus making life at that time and space impossible.
Source Journal Reference:Josefin Martell, Carl Alwmark, Luke Daly, Stephen Hall, SannaAlwmark, Robin Woracek, Johan Hektor, Lukas Helfen, Alessandro Tengattini, Martin Lee. The scale of a martian hydrothermal system explored using combined neutron and x-ray tomography. Science Advances, 2022; 8 (19) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn3044
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