Martian Lava Rock illuminates the critical period of the history of the red planet

No matter how many missions on Mars participates, the pure joy of discovering the discovery about the Red Planet is never old for Mariek Schmidt.

In the new work, “A variety and highly differentiated Lava Apartment in Lake Crater, Mars: The limitations of intracryal magmatism discovered by Mars 2020 Pixl,” published in Progress of scienceSchmidt and its international research team shared convincing findings about the critical period of planets evolutionary history.

Professor and Chairman of the Department of Land Sciences University of Brock was a scientist who participated in the Nasa mission Mars persistent Rover and analyzed Ancient rocks It was found in Mars’s Crater Lake. One of the main goals of the mission is to seek signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, and magnetic rocks and regolith tested in the area have also given insight into the time in the history of the planets that have yet to be studied in detail.

“We’re doing things on Mars that have never been done before,” Schmidt says.

Schmidt is also a coinfire in a planetary instrument for X -ray lithochemistry (PIXL). Pixl, which is a X -ray fluorescent spectrometer, has been used to determine the elemental composition of mathic surface materials of a fine scale, allowing scientists to be removed deep into the rocks to investigate how they have been formed and what they have been made from.

“The scope of science was amazing; it is the most comprehensive study to this day, which is cooked to return the Mars sample,” Schmidt says. “We now know the chemistry of minerals and rocks and understand the textures, but the next step was to talk about how we think the rocks formed, in terms of magma that rise and crystallize in Marshevska bark, and then evolve and change the composition.”

Work, published on Friday, January 24, also sets a series of hypotheses that can run further research when samples are taken to Earth’s year from now on. NASA is currently formulating plans for this in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA).

Tanya Kizovski, a paper co -author and a co -worker of curator of mineralology at the Royal Museum Ontario, says that all Mars samples that have been studied on Earth have been meteorites so far.

Most Mars meteorites are less than 500 million years old-Relaxatively young compared to Mars history of 4.5 billion years-dok that are believed to be at least 3.5 billion years.

“Mars is very well preserved in terms of the early history of our solar system, so it will be able to look at the rocks that are old-erected when they are brought to Earth-to find out about the history of our inner solar system and when life has developed,” says Kizovski, a postdoctoral colleague from Brock during the project.

“We can also go out when magnetic rocks have crystallized. We can’t do it while the rock is still on Mars, but these patterns will be important anchor that we can use to learn about the process of process in the region analyzed here on Earth.”

Samples also come from a unique time in the history of Mars, Schmidt says, when the inner dynamics of the planet have undergone major changes.

“Vulcanism on Mars really dominates what we call hot stains – similar to Earth’s Hawaii or Iceland – where there is a focused source of magma that is rooted deep, breaks through everything and then erupts on the surface,” she says.

“But early in the history of Mars, there is a modeling that supports the idea that the Martian crust has built a widely widespread volcano – not necessarily focused on these hot spots – and the transition is thought to have happened at the time when these rocks formed.”

Schmidt and the team still have to wait for a while – a potential decade or more – before the samples plan to land on the ground.

“Adding these samples from Mars will be incredibly challenging and involving incredible feature -industry, especially if you consider that you are retrieved from the orbit of something that is basically the size of a basketball,” Schmidt says.

In the meantime, the persistent Rover is still passing Mars and collects samples in a new place, while Schmidt and her colleagues patiently wait for the opportunity to analyze Marseine rock one day on Earth.