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RT
September 29, 2013
The rover Curiosity has discovered water in fine-grained soil on the surface of Mars, NASA confirmed Thursday in a series of papers published in the journal Science.
Each cubic foot of Martian soil contains about two pints of liquid water, though the molecules are bound to other minerals in the soil.
Curiosity first landed on Mars in August 2012 on Gale Crater, near the equator of the planet. Its aim was to circle and scale Mount Sharp, in the middle of the crater, a five-kilometer-tall mountain that will help NASA understand the history of Mars.
NASA scientists released the first detailed, peer-reviewed results of Curiosity’s experiments done during its first four months on Mars in a series of five papers published in Science.
“We tend to think of Mars as this dry place — to find water fairly easy to get out of the soil at the surface was exciting to me,” said Laurie Leshin, dean of science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and lead author on the Science paper that verified existence of water in the surface soil.
“If you took about a cubic foot of the dirt and heated it up, you’d get a couple of pints of water out of that — a couple of water bottles’ worth that you would take to the gym,” she said, according to the Guardian.
Curiosity found about 2 percent of the soil, by weight, was water by scooping dirt samples under its wheels and depositing them into an oven in a centralized compartment called Sample Analysis at Mars.
“We heat [the soil] up to 835C and drive off all the volatiles and measure them,” said Leshin. “We have a very sensitive way to sniff those and we can detect the water and other things that are released.”
The rover also found sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and oxygen as soil and minerals collected decomposed with increased temperature.
