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The wind direction changed by about 180 degrees, which would be expected if a dust devil had passed directly over the lander. APSS measured a peak wind speed of 45 miles per hour (20 meters per second). But it also detected the biggest air pressure drop ever recorded by a Mars surface mission: 9 pascals, or 13% of ambient pressure. That pressure drop suggests there may have been even stronger winds that were too turbulent for sensors to record.
"The absolute fastest wind we've directly measured so far from InSight was 63 miles per hour (28 meters per second), so the vortex that lifted dust off our solar panels was among the strongest winds we've seen," said InSight participating scientist Aymeric Spiga of the Dynamic Meteorology Laboratory at Sorbonne University in Paris. "Without a passing vortex, the winds are more typically between about 4-20 miles per hour (2-10 meters per second), depending on time of day."
Preliminary reports include insights that suggest the massive dust storms could have impacted Martian water, winds, and climate in the past and how they might influence future weather and solar power generation on the planet. Scientists say that the global dust storms may explain how the lakes, rivers, and possible oceans that evidence has been found of could have disappeared.
Recently, Essam Heggy, a research scientist at the University of Southern California and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Abotalib Z. Abotalib, a postdoctoral research associate at USC, suggested that the flows are triggered not by near-surface water but rather from deep below the surface.
“We propose an alternative hypothesis, that they originate from a deep, pressurized groundwater source, which comes to the surface, moving upward along ground cracks," said Heggy.
While NASA’s InSight Mars mission is primarily focused on collecting data from the Red Planet’s interior, the lander recently trained one of its cameras on the Martian horizon, capturing a series of sunrise and sunset images.
Do they really think Mars was covered with dust when there was water on the surface? I would think Mars only got dusty after most of it's water was locked-up underground.
After the water seeped into the deep rock, it never returned to the surface due to the density of the amphibole rock that the water moved into. This geology, plus Mars' smaller size, have kept the water trapped beneath the surface for billions of years. "On early Earth, hydrated crustal rocks would tend to be less dense than their anhydrous equivalents, meaning they would ‘float’ near the surface until they have lost their water. This provided a return path for surface water back to the surface of early Earth," says Wade. "On Mars it was the opposite story—hydrous, dense rocks would have tended to sink, locking the water away in the upper mantle." Because Mars is cold and not terribly geologically active, it's unlikely, Wade says, that any aquifers of water persist in the upper mantle, though he is uncertain if liquid water might survive at deeper levels. It paints a bleak picture for early Mars, but one that may well answer where the oceans of the Red Planet disappeared to.
However, it appears that the cold ion outflow into the martian tail, due to the transfer of momentum from the solar wind to the ionospheric plasma, could have removed a global ocean with a depth of 10–70 m during the first ~150 million years after the Sun arrived at the ZAMS.
originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: highvein
The existence of the underground water is still somewhat speculative, as would be any notion of how it got there I suppose. Underground water on Earth isn't very mysterious but as far as being "locked" there for billions of years, who knows?
However, on Mars, the evidence for subglacial water at the poles is much stronger and not so mysterious.
“We propose an alternative hypothesis, that they originate from a deep, pressurized groundwater source, which comes to the surface, moving upward along ground cracks," said Heggy.
originally posted by: Phage
This would be water from an aquifer which is billions of years old and unreplenished, unlike those of Earth. It's possible that those streaky things are evidence of liquid water, I guess. It's possible that those billions year old aquifers are still leaky, I guess. But a billion years is a long, long time.
originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: LookingAtMars
Do they really think Mars was covered with dust when there was water on the surface? I would think Mars only got dusty after most of it's water was locked-up underground.
But why was it locked underground?
Dust storms are not the only mechanism thought to have led to the desiccation of Mars (photolysis and mineral hydration is thought to have played a part as well), but they don't seem to have helped the situation. Bad turned worse.
www.theregister.co.uk...
originally posted by: Justoneman
Possibly and based on what I have read, we have some Scientist who think that Mars had a big hit and the atmosphere was blown off during that event that was the death blow to the possible life on Mars?
originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
I don't know a lot about Mars, but it's interesting to read about.