Water on Mars? The mysterious dark lines are not what the scholars believe

In 1976, NASA Vikings mission He successfully fell on the first spacecraft on Mars. When the task began to send pictures from the surface of Mars to the ground, scientists noticed long dark lines on the walls of the hole and the sides of the cliff. To this day, some researchers indicate that strange geographical features are the result of water flow – but a recent study says otherwise.

Planetary scientists from the University of Brown and the University of Bern used artificial intelligence to reveal that mysterious Mars lines are likely to result from wind and dust, not water flow. Its results have important effects on exploring Mars in the future, as well as the continuous research of humanity for environments suitable for housing and life outside the ground.

Some lines of the slope are long-term, while each other-is called Lineae (RSL) (RSL)-they appear constantly in the same places during the most hot Mars in the year. Although Mars is generally dry and cold (With low temperatures up to -225 degrees Fahrenheit, or -153 ° C) Small amounts of potential ice water, underground sources or moisture can be mixed with enough salt To become liquid and flow under the slope. Since water is a major element of life on Earth, these configurations may also represent housing areas on the Red Planet as well. But some researchers are not convinced, on the pretext that dry operations could have created these features instead.

To settle the matter, the researchers trained an algorithm on a set of data from the confirmed slope line scenes, as detailed in a Ticket Publishing Monday in Nature Communications. Then they used the algorithm to wipe more than 86,000 high -resolution satellite images and create a map of the conditions of the Mars slope.

“Once we got this global map, we can compare it to the rules of data and index for other things such as temperature, wind speed, moisturizing, rock segment activity and other factors,” said Valentine Pik, co -author of the study. statement. “Then we can search for connections that exceed hundreds of thousands of cases to understand the conditions under which these features are formed.”

Simply put, its results do not link the slope lines and RSLS with features indicating the presence of liquid or even frost. Instead, the researchers discovered that both slope lines and RSLS tend to develop in areas with high wind and dust. In other words, it is likely to be caused by a dry process in which the dust layers suddenly slide on the slope, resulting from external forces.

Instead of seeing these results as another failure to search for life outside the planet, planet scientists explain that the study still carries a weight for future Mars exploration. If their theoretical research confirmed that the slope lines were caused by water, and as a result, the region may host a form of life, NASA would already avoid the region at the present time. This is because scientists are afraid that space vehicles and Rovers still housed the life of the Earth, such as microbes, which can pollute Mars and interfere with our search for Mars’s life.

“This is the feature of the huge data approach,” explained by ADOMAS VALANTINAS, the other author of the study and the world of planets at the University of Brown specializing in Merikhi geology. “It helps us exclude some hypotheses from orbit before we send spacecraft to explore.”

In an industry that looks obsessed With finding Water on MarsThe study is a reminder that not every scientific penetration around life should be outside the planet.