These images, taken by the Spirit rover, illustrate Hillary's naked breed, located on top of Hasband Hill. This is direct evidence of the activity of acid mists on the surface of Mars. The photo shows a previously existing schism, which is “healing”, which indicates the presence of sour clays.
In some places, Martian landscapes dissolve. According to the analysis of information obtained by the now inactive Mars rover Spirit, this is due to acid mists. The latter appeared due to the fact that small amounts of water contained in the atmosphere of Mars, combined with the acid fumes of volcanoes, and then fell on the dark slopes of hills and rocks.
NASA's Mars Rover Oportyuniti landed in 2004, it was designed for only 3 months of work. But after more than 10 years, the brave apparatus is close to overcoming a distance of 41.8 km, despite several “senile” memory gaps.
On Earth, the closest analogue of this phenomenon is the Hawaiian vogue, i.e., acid volcanic smog, which will be thought of from Kilauea volcano. However, on Mars, acid erosion is much more “gentle” and slower: this process takes hundreds of millions of years in discharged, dry and cold Martian air.
Acid mist on Mars left a gelatinous sediment on a rocky surface, dissolving the crystal structure of rocks in an inaccurate stone pool. “A lot of people talked about erosion on Mars,” says Brown University University planetary scientist Ralph Milliken. Researchers have already developed models for studying how acid mists destroy the Martian surface century after century, although evidence of this process was rare. “New research is consistent with some of those models.”
The mentioned studies conducted by planetary scientist Shoshann Kohl prove that it is acid fumes that are responsible for stone pools on the surface of Mars with an area of 0.4 km2 in the area of Hasband Hill, near the hills of Columbia in Gusev crater. Kohl summarized the data obtained from the Spirit rover to detect patterns that no device could fix. She told about the work done on Monday in Baltimore at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.
“I study geology with all the instruments that give information,” says Kohl, an assistant professor at Ithaki College, who began work on her doctoral dissertation while she was studying at Cornell University. “Different devices give different data.”
Kohl studied hilly stones from the Cumberland Ridge and Hassband Hill, which belong to the Watchtower bare rocks. These stones constitute the main rock of this area, which according to Kohl, has not been altered for billions of years. You do not need to understand the geochemistry of metals to understand the pie charts, which show how much the chemical composition of the plot, which occupies about a third of the football field, differs. A 1.2 meter mark indicates the distance between the right and left wheels of the rover.
To find out the chemical composition of the stones, Kohl studied the readings of the APXS spectrometer installed on Spirit. She found that the Watchtower stones had an identical composition, although they looked different. The Mössbauer spectrometer revealed an interval in the ratio of iron oxides and total iron. This means that a substance has entered into a chemical reaction with different rocks at different intensities.
The proportion of iron oxidation varied along the Cumberland Ridge from 0.43 to 0.94 over an interval of only 30 meters. At the same segment of the earth, the Mössbauer spectrometer and Mini-TES showed that the crystalline minerals in the rock lost their structure, becoming less crystalline with the change in the level of iron oxidation.
Everything is completed by the fact that hilly protrusions, or agglomerations, in the rock differ in size and other characteristics, according to the images from the panoramic camera and other Spirit sensors.
“The dynamics of changes in the size of agglomerations from west to east are the same as those of iron,” says Kohl. - “It's great that we saw it.” It seems that all the rocks were originally the same. Then they changed the acid evaporation of volcanic eruptions. This acid mist approached the stones, dissolved some minerals, forming a gelatinous precipitate. Then the water dried out, the solid residue formed agglomerations.
“Everything happened quietly, but for a very long time,” says Kohl. - “There is a place where you can discover how a bonding substance closes the split. This is very cool. I was very happy when I found him. ”
She has an explanation of why some rocks were more eroded by acid mist than others. When she noted on the map the most deformed rocks with the largest agglomerations, she noticed that they are located on shady, steep slopes that turned away from the sun, where water can linger longer. The least damaged by mists of rocks were in the lower areas of the relief, where the sun constantly shines.
“What I like most about Shoshanna’s work is that she combines hardware,” says Milliken, who was not directly involved in this work. “This is exactly what a geologist would do if he went to field research.”
