Scientists Discovered Salt on Mars Surface, can solve organic puzzle of Red planet
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NASA: Mars mission : A team of NASA scientists researching Mars has predicted organic or carbon-rich salts to be present there. NASA team has found signs of organic salts present there. Like ancient pottery, these salts can be chemical residues of organic compounds. Such remains were also previously unearthed by NASA’s Curiosity Rover. Organic compounds and salts on Mars may be formed by geologic processes or may be remnants of ancient microorganism life, scientists are now studying further on this matter.
Further strengthening the idea that organic matter was already present on Mars, as well as the detection of organic salts directly, will also give an idea of the possibility of the future on modern Mars. This can happen just as some organisms on our earth use organic salts such as oxalates and acetate for energy.
James MT Lewis, an organic geochemist on the NASA team studying the surface of Mars, said that if we determine that organic salts are concentrated anywhere on Mars, we want to investigate those areas further and ideally Formally drilled deep below the surface where better-preserved organic salts may be present. The research, based on NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Lewis, was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets.
Information collected on the basis of studies in Lewis’s laboratory and sample analysis on Mars (analysis of data from SAM) as well as studies in a portable chemistry laboratory of the robotic curiosity there, indirectly towards the presence of organic salts there. Gestures, but identifying them directly on Mars is a bit difficult for devices like SAM. SAM heats the soil and rocks of Mars to release gases reflecting the composition of these samples.
The challenge is that heating organic salts releases only ordinary gases that can be released by other ingredients in the soil of Mars. In order to find life on other planets, it is necessary to find organic molecules, or their organic salt residues there, but this is a challenging task on the surface of Mars.
Here billions of years of radiation have eroded or destroyed organic materials. Like an archaeologist digging pottery pieces, Curiosity collects the soil and rocks of Mars, which may contain small fragments of organic compounds, and then SAM and other tools identify their chemical composition.
However, Lewis and his team propose that another investigative tool CheMin that is studying the soil, chemistry and mineralogy of Mars uses a different technique and can detect some organic salts.
