NASA has found water in the soil on the surface of Mars in the first scoop of soil analyzed by NASA's Mars Curiosity rover. The exciting results were published in the journal Science on Thursday.
The one-ton Mars Curiosity rover - the largest robot we've sent to the red planet - hosts a bevy of scientific equipment designed to make breakthrough discoveries just like this one. In this study, scientists used the rover's scooper to carve out some dust, dirt, and sandy soil from an area on the surface of Mars called the "Rocknest."
That scoop was fed into the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite of scientific instruments on board Curiosity, which included a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph, and a tunable laser spectrometer, according to NASA, which are used to identify chemical compounds in soil samples, along with telling researchers just how much of each element discovered is in the sample.
When the small sample of the red planet's soil was fed into the SAM, it was heated to 1,535 degrees Fahrenheit and analyzed. The chemical compounds chlorine and oxygen, were found in the baked sample, along with carbon dioxide, oxygen and sulfur compounds. The analysis also indicated the presence of carbonate materials, which form in water.
"One of the most exciting results from this very first solid sample ingested by Curiosity is the high percentage of water in the soil," said Laurie Leshin, lead author of one paper and dean of the School Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "About 2 percent of the soil on the surface of Mars is made up of water, which is a great resource, and interesting scientifically."
It also proves the value of having the SAM system onboard, and gives scientists lots of other data about the composition of the soil to chew on.
"This work not only demonstrates that SAM is working beautifully on Mars, but also shows how SAM fits into Curiosity's powerful and comprehensive suite of scientific instruments," said Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator for SAM at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Mahaffy continued, "by combining analyses of water and other volatiles from SAM with mineralogical, chemical and geological data from Curiosity's other instruments, we have the most comprehensive information ever obtained on Martian surface fines. These data greatly advance our understanding surface processes and the action of water on Mars."
The amount of water in the soil, by weight, equaled about a couple pints of water per cubic foot of Mars dirt. The study, which was published in five separate papers in the journal Science adds to the scientific opinion that water once flowed on the surface of Mars.
It also bolsters the idea that Mars could be a habitable place, with water not only existing in the polar ice caps, but (relatively) abundant throughout the planet's surface. However, don't get too excited about a trip to mars just yet. Another compound was discovered by Curiosity's soil analysis called perchlorate, which impedes thyroid function in human beings.
The presence of that chemical in the soil means that breathing in the dust on the surface of Mars would be toxic, but - one thing at a time, future explorers.
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