While Mars is one of our most widely explored planets, there is still so much more to discover.
Late last year, scientists may have discovered something huge in helping us determine the suitability of the Red Planet for human colonization in the future.
While examining beneath the surface of Mars, China’s Zhurong rover discovered evidence of giant polygonal wedges more than 100 feet under the surface. Scientists reporting in the journal Nature Astronomy explained that they likely formed by “thermal contraction cracking”.
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NASA’s Curiosity rover has previously found surface-level polygons measuring just centimetres-wide which were formed in continuous wet-dry cycles where water evaporates from mud, causing the mud to shrink and cracks to form on the surface.
But when we compare this to the gargantuan shapes found underneath the surface, it seems clear that a different mechanism was at play millions of years ago.
Using a ground-penetrating radar, the Zhurong rover is able to observe a massive 100 meters down below the surface — that’s far more than the 10 meters allowed by NASA’s Perseverance rover.
The research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences found walls of polygons from depths of 35 – 65 metres. Lead researcher Lei Zhang and team believe the discovery may be related to water / ice freeze-thaw processes impacting early Mars.
The researchers also suggest that the discovery shows water froze at low latitudes, which would have required wide climatic changes.
A member from the Curiosity rover team at NASA, Benton Clark, believes that the discovery could lead to further information about the planet’s water history, possibly helping to answer questions like ‘when were the wet spells on Mars?’
These kinds of questions could have huge implications for any potential colonization of the Red Planet — which we can only assume Elon Musk is keen to hear more about.
Zhang’s team say with no polygonal terrain above the 35-meter mark, we can hypothesize a ‘stark environmental transition’ that marked the end of the planet’s wet period.
If the future does hold human colonization on Mars, we’re going to need water sources, that’s for sure. So this discovery could form a central part to the research that gets us there.