Mars May Have Seen Snow As Recently As 400000 Years Ago ssc

New data from China’s Zhurong rover suggests that large amounts of liquid water may have existed on Mars some 400,000 years ago. This water was present in the form of melted ice in the known sandy dunes of the planet.

Since the Zhurong rover landed on the Red Planet in early 2021, the rover has sent us a lot of information about Mars. For decades, we have known that there have been ancient rivers on Mars, and until now it was thought that the last liquid present on Mars had dried up some 300 million years ago.

This hypothesis was also rejected last year, when the Zhurong rover reported on the basis of some evidence that liquid water may have existed on Mars as recently as 700 million years ago. Zhurong has spent the last few years investigating Utopia Planitia. It is a vast plain on the surface of Mars, with the largest impact basin in the Solar System, 3,300 kilometers away.

According to the team of the Chinese Academy of Sciences working on the mission, this mission provides important clues for future exploration missions to search for signs of existing life on the planet. Scientists say that they are wrapped in bunches of thin, torn crusts and particles on dunes or dunes. This happens only when liquid water has been present there recently.

Xiaoguang Qin, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an author of the research, says that sand dunes are much more modern landforms. The crusts formed on the dunes have frozen the sand dunes and due to which they cannot move.

This new evidence suggests that between 1.4 million and 4 million years ago, ice may have accumulated on the Red Planet. The presence of minerals deposited on sand dunes indicates the presence of water there. Substances like sulfates, silica, iron oxide and chloride have been found in these particles. According to the researchers, when the temperature dropped below the frost point, the water vapor froze as snow on the dunes. Because of this, cracks and crusts formed in the dunes.

Mars May Have Seen Snow as Recently as 400,000 Years Ago, Zhurong Rover Suggestshttps://t.co/lkVe8EJ0ZK

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However, other researchers have accepted the arguments of this team as correct, but there is still a possibility that these mounds were formed by some other geological process. This research has been published in the journal Science Advances.