Most astrophysicists agree that liquid water once existed on Mars. What is disputed, however, is how much water that was. In a new analysis, a research team from the University of Copenhagen has concluded that the planet may have been covered by an ocean up to 300 meters deep some 4.5 billion years ago. the study was published in the journal “Science Advances” free. So was the Red Planet once blue and possibly had life?
“In the early stages, young Mars was bombarded by ice-filled asteroids,” says Martin Bizarro of the Center for Star and Planet Formation at the University of Copenhagen, one of the study’s lead authors. “This happened within the first 100 million years of planetary evolution.” In addition to water, the icy asteroids also brought with them biologically relevant molecules such as amino acids. They are found in all living things known to date and serve as building blocks for proteins. “Although the rate of preservation of biologically relevant molecules depends on many factors, our results provide evidence that exotic organic matter may have made its way onto the Martian surface,” the authors write.
Researchers were able to reconstruct the early history of Mars using a billion-year-old meteorite. The meteorite was once part of the crust of Mars and provides a unique insight into what happened during the formation of the Solar System. The chromium isotopes present in it provide information about the nucleosynthetic history and formation time of planetary deposits. The study says the mystery lies in the way the Martian surface formed, of which the meteorite was once a part, as the surface does not move. The situation on earth is just the opposite. Tectonic plates are in constant motion. It erased all traces of the first 500 million years of Earth’s history.
