NASA makes historic announcement
NASA has found evidence for the existence of water on Mars.
Corina Cristea, 09.10.2015, 13:23
On September 28 Google changed its search engine logo to mark the discovery of spectral evidence for the existence of hydrated salts in recurring slope lineae on Mars. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration made a historic announcement regarding the existence of liquid water on the planet Mars, although no hard evidence to confirm this hypothesis have been found. US scientists believe however that streaks of hydrated salts, which appeared in dark colours on the spectrometer scanning the upper shell of the Red Planet are directly associated with period flows of water. At present NASA is conducting five orbit and surface probing missions on Mars, using the robotic rovers Opportunity and Curiosity, which reached the surface of Mars in 2004 and 2012 respectively, as well as the Mars Odyssey, MRO and MAVEN orbiters.
The Mars Express European probe and the Mars Orbiter Mission probe are also collecting data from the Mars orbit, sending them back to earth via satellite. These data point to a series of high-relief elements on Marss hillsides associated with salt deposits. Such deposits might result in changes in the freezing and evaporation rates of water into Marss rarefied atmosphere, thus keeping water in a liquid state long enough so that it may flow at the level of the planets upper shell. In practical terms, scientific data suggest that water flows seasonally on Mars. The presence of liquid water on this planet can have tremendous implications in terms of mans efforts to explore Mars, says science journalist Alexandru Mironov:
“I believe that the next mission to Mars, which lies not as far ahead as we might think, and thats a great relief for us, will no longer make it a point from transporting water in gigantic containers to this neighbouring planet, because water is already ‘onboard this planet, so to say, which will be inhabited by Martian Homo Sapiens, namely the first people to live on Mars. Engineers will find methods to extract clean water from the mixture of salts and water. These are sodium chlorates and magnesium and sodium perchlorates which have been identified, and they can be used to obtain water, which can be observed in a liquid state on the planet every summer.
Will the evidence pointing to the existence of liquid water on Mars open up vistas for major breakthroughs, such as the existence of possible life forms on this planet? Alexandru Mironov tried to provide an answer:
“I dont doubt that there are life forms on Mars. They are called extremophiles, and are organisms that live in extreme environments. On Earth you can find these organisms in the Atacama and Sahara deserts. So, there is life on Mars, maybe it is at the dawn of its development and evolution, or, as it is suspected, planet Mars was the first to have had life forms, after which a cosmic event, a cosmic catastrophe made the atmosphere get thinner, caused water to sublimate, to disappear in the cosmic space or be transferred to Earth. Which is very likely to have happened.
Alexandru Mironov believes that in 2019 the first human flight to Mars is likely to be tested.
“A first human expedition will start from Earth to planet Mars and after orbiting the planet for 501 days it will return to Earth. Astronomers have this celestial mathematics that functions perfectly. We know for sure that the trip to and back from Mars will last exactly 501 days. The manned mission will fly around Mars just as in 1968 a human mission started from Earth on Christmas day, flew around the Moon and returned to Earth. This actually heralded the 1969 event, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. This is what will happen in 2019 with the flight to and from Mars, without any stopover.
Why 2019? Because in 2019 there will be a “window of opportunity, that is a moment when planets will be very close to each other. Humans will be able to set foot on Mars in 2031 when NASA has scheduled such a mission as Alexandru Mironov explained:
“Probably it will be an international team, because such a mission belongs to the whole world. The team will include the best experts in the field. I guess in the next years there will be a program part of which several spaceships will be sent on orbit. The first one will be a robotic spaceship that will launch a sort of factory equipped with robots to provide the future human mission on Mars with what they need. The second spaceship will be manned. The third one will be another robotic spaceship, the forth manned and so on and so forth. A spaceship will be launched on orbit around Mars each time to wait for the people who went to explore the planet and transport them back home.
The robots will build a special station that will include a factory producing oxygen. All these could mean that in 300 or 400 years time people on planet Earth will have a future on Mars. Humankind has existed for 200 thousand years in the form of Homo Sapiens, there are 7.4 billion people on Earth, Alexandru Mironov reminded, saying that humans have little space left on Earth and thus they need to look for space on other planets.
