Water on Mars is buried beneath the surface of minerals : NASA scientists

New Delhi : Mars was home to lakes and oceans billions of years ago, but today it has been something of a mystery where all the water went to transform the planet into the desolate rock. Most of it was thought to have been lost to space.

But NASA scientists’ new study proposes that it didn’t go anywhere but is trapped within minerals in the crust.

Eva Scheller, lead author of the new paper in Science, told AFP, “Crust forms what we call hydrated minerals, so minerals that actually have water in their crystal structure” .

In fact, this model of Scheller suggests anywhere between 30 – 99% of the initial water remains trapped inside these minerals.

It is being claimed in research that the early Mars had enough water to cover the whole planet in roughly 100 to 1,500 meters (330 to 4,4920 feet) of ocean. Because the planet lost its magnetic field early in its history, its atmosphere was progressively stripped away, and it was assumed this was how it lost its water.

But the authors of the new study believe that while some of the water did disappear, the majority remained. The team focused on hydrogen, a key component of water using observations made by Mars rovers as well as of meteorites from the planet.

There are different kinds of hydrogen atoms. Most have just one proton in their nucleus, but a tiny fraction, about 0.02 percent, have both a proton and a neutron, making them heavier.

These are known as deuterium, or “heavy” hydrogen. Because the lighter kind escapes the planet’s atmosphere at a faster rate, the loss of most of the water to space would leave relatively more deuterium behind.

But given how much water the planet is believed to have started with, and the current rate of hydrogen escape observed by spacecraft, the current deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio cannot be explained by atmospheric loss alone.