Buried dozens of meters below Mars’ equator is a large honeycomb pattern similar to those found near Earth’s cold poles.
Each crevasse is 70 meters (230 feet) wide (about half a football field) and is bordered by 30 meters wide (98 feet wide) slurries of ice and mud. Scientists say this material is probably between 2 and 3.5 billion years old. The patterns were detected in data sent home by China’s now-communicative Zhurong rover, which explored a vast, rugged region called Utopia Planitia north of Mars’ equator.
Zhruong rolled just over a kilometer (0.6 miles) towards the southern region of Mars later that year, but even during such a short trip its radar had detected a continuous pattern of 15 embedded polygons; This indicated that there may be more polygons waiting to be discovered. The study’s lead author, Lei Zhang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Space.com in an email.
On Earth, similar patterns are known to form only in Greenland, Iceland, and Antarctica, where drastic temperature drops caused by seasonal changes cause the ground to contract and break. Sometimes ice and mud fill these cracks, preventing them from healing, causing the surface to split further. A similar process on Mars about 2 to 3.5 billion years ago may have caused the newly detected fissures, which are tens of meters larger than those found on our planet. “These polygons are huge,” Zhang said.
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In short, this discovery provides new evidence that the Red Planet was once home to water and a climate suitable for life as we know it.
Surprisingly, the model also shows that the tropics on Mars are cold enough to cause cracks similar to those seen near Earth’s icy pole. This mystery may be answered by an existing (but unproven) theory that proposes that Mars was once tilted much more on its axis (forty degrees or more) about 5 million years ago than it is today. “Such an extreme tilt scenario muddies the waters between the idea that the polar regions are cold and the lower latitudes are hot,” Zhang said.
The newly discovered embedded polygon model is “an interesting discovery” and will help understand the inner workings of a critical period, says William Rapin, a scientist at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Paris who was not connected to the new research. Mars, which can be hospitable to life. Your rap was part of a team found recently Similar-shaped, centimeter-sized mud cracks on the surface of Mars near Gale crater are currently being investigated by NASA’s Curiosity rover.
Similar ancient sites on Earth are difficult to access because our planet routinely recycles its surface. But on Mars, “all these layers are in very good shape,” Rapin said. “So we can search for a period that might be suitable for the origin of life.”
The tilt, or tilt, of Mars has changed over the last 3.5 billion years. If it were not tilted at all, its equator would be the hottest place because it receives the most direct sunlight, and the temperature would decrease towards the poles. But computer models show that the wobbling planet was extremely tilted several million years ago, meaning that where sunlight falls varies throughout the year. During this period, Mars experienced nights that “reached” as far as its equator for half of its orbit around the sun, about six months, Rapin said.
Mars’ tilt is known to vary more than Earth’s, shifting more than ten degrees in 100,000 years. In fact, this shift is what scientists believe caused such dramatic changes in its climate, transforming it from a once blue oasis to the arid red lands we see now. But the newly identified polygon pattern could help scientists narrow down exactly what it is. When These drastic climate changes occur, Zhang said.
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Detecting the pattern 35 meters (115 feet) below the surface “means that the polygons formed, evolved over a period of time, but then suddenly stopped,” he explained. Martian soil must not have experienced the same temperature fluctuations in the recent past, causing it to layer over these fissures. “When the polygons stopped, it might have been a time when the climate changed, suddenly going from a pretty cold climate to a pretty nice, temperate climate.”
Zhurong traveler became quiet Late last year, after failing to wake up from its planned hibernation, scientists speculated it succumbed to Mars’ violent dust storms. Meanwhile, NASA’s Curiosity rover, which spent 4,000 days on Mars last month, will reach a terrain full of fractures large enough to be seen from orbit next year. Rapin hypothesizes that these may represent the formation of an ancient, extreme drought and hopes to compare them with newly discovered polygons in Utopia Planitia.
“They’re pretty far away,” Rapin said. “It’s kind of like a dream that we get to them.”
This research is described as follows: paper It was published last month in the journal Nature Astronomy.