Study: NASA's Mars rovers found manganese oxides in Gale's rocks
When NASA's Mars rovers found manganese oxides in rocks in the Gale and Endeavor craters on Mars in 2014, the discovery led some scientists to suggest that the red planet might have once had more oxygen in its atmosphere billions of years ago.
The minerals probably required abundant water and strongly oxidizing conditions to form, the scientists said. Using lessons learned from Earth's geologic record, scientists concluded that the presence of manganese oxides indicated that Mars had experienced periodic increases in atmospheric oxygen in its past -- before declining to today's low levels.
But a new experimental study from Washington University in St. Louis upends this view.
Scientists discovered that under Mars-like conditions, manganese oxides can be readily formed without atmospheric oxygen. Using kinetic modeling, the scientists also showed that manganese oxidation is not possible in the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere expected on ancient Mars.
"The link between manganese oxides and oxygen suffers from an array of fundamental geochemical problems," said Jeffrey Catalano, a professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences and corresponding author of the study published Dec. 22 in Nature Geoscience. Catalano is a faculty fellow of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.
The first author of the study is Kaushik Mitra, now a postdoctoral research associate at Stony Brook University, who completed this work as part of his graduate research at Washington University.
Mars is a planet rich in the halogen elements chlorine and bromine compared to Earth. "Halogens occur on Mars in forms different from on the Earth, and in much larger amounts, and we guessed that they would be important to the fate of
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