Article Posted on : - Jun 03, 2009

NASA's Spacecraft Phoenix showing water mark on the surface of Mars. Photo credit: NASA

NEW DELHI (BNS): NASA scientists modeled freezing conditions on Mars to test whether liquid water could have been present to form the surface features of the Martian landscape.

"We found that the salts in water solutions can reduce the melting point of water, which may help explain how liquid water existed in a frozen Martian environment," said Alberto Fairén, a space scientist at NASA.

According to Science Daily, scientists who focused on the surface features of mars and Martian landscape found presence of water ponds ranging from seas to lakes, and rivers and gullies formed by flowing water, which imply that early Mars was wet.

A greenhouse atmosphere produced by carbon dioxide and water would have been saturated well below freezing. In addition, the amount of methane needed to raise the surface temperature above freezing, implies the planet had a terrestrial-like biological source for its methane supply, according to previous investigations.

Scientists calculated fluids similar to those seen in Mars and found many fluids as liquid at temperatures well below freezing point. Scientists concluded that salty liquid water on Mars may explain the stability of fluids against freezing on the Martian surface at temperatures below 0°C.

"Our goal was to learn how a combination of different processes of evaporation and freezing affect the freezing point of a hypothetical Martian solution. We also wanted to see how the liquid phases formed and destabilized over the evolution of different solutions," added Alfonso Davila, a co-author of the paper at NASA Ames Research Center.