(ORDO NEWS) — Planetologists from the United States and Great Britain have discovered that current discharges caused by Martian dust storms release chlorine compounds from the Martian soil and saturate the planet’s atmosphere with them.
his discovery explains fluctuations in chlorine concentration recorded by the Russian-European ExoMars-TGO mission.
“Our experiments have shown that Martian dust storms and the current discharges they generate very quickly release chlorine from the chlorides present in the planet’s soil.
This explains why measurements from the ExoMars-TGO probe indicate a connection between the global chlorine cycle in the Martian atmosphere and global and regional dust storms,” said Kevin Olsen, a researcher at the University of Oxford (UK), quoted by the WUSTL press service.
Dust storms and other atmospheric phenomena associated with the accumulation of sand particles and other forms of solid matter in the air are the main “conductors” of climate and weather on Mars.
Large Martian dust storms and “dust devils” are accompanied by flashes of lightning and other atmospheric discharges of electricity.
They presumably arise as a result of the collision of dust particles with Martian air molecules, as well as as a result of their mutual friction.
The chlorine cycle on Mars
The researchers decided to find out how these electrical discharges affect the circulation of carbon, oxygen and chlorine in the Martian atmosphere.
The interest of scientists in these processes was due to the fact that Martian dust storms raise particles of carbonates, chlorides and other mineral salts into the atmosphere, whose decay under the action of electrical discharges is potentially capable of causing gaseous compounds of oxygen, carbon and chlorine.
Guided by this idea, scientists prepared an analogue of Martian air and pumped it into a chamber, inside which the researchers caused analogues of Martian dust storms.
In the same container, Olsen and his colleagues placed a set of salts similar in properties to those substances that are present in the soils of Mars, after which they followed their interaction with air and current discharges.
Experiments have shown that lightning and other discharges of electricity effectively release chlorine from particles of the Martian soil analogue.
On average, in just a few hours of a medium-sized dust storm, electric shocks released about 0.1-1% of the chlorine atoms present in the soil particles floating in the air.
As a result, many molecules of gaseous chlorine got into the analogue of the Martian atmosphere.
Olsen and his colleagues currently estimate that this amount of chlorine is enough to explain the spikes in its concentration recorded by ExoMars-TGO in the Martian atmosphere during powerful dust storms in 2018 and 2019.
In addition, the intense circulation of chlorine between the atmosphere and the surface of Mars explains how many perchlorates, chlorine and oxygen compounds have accumulated in its soils, the researchers concluded.
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