IS there climate change on Mars? Scots scientists are working with NASA to identify “major” climate shifts on the Red Planet.
The Stirling University team believes the technology used by the heat flow probe on the latest Nasa mission to Mars may help understand similar events on Earth.
Dr Nicholas Attree and other experts at the university’s Planetary Ices Laboratory are working with the US agency on its InSight mission, which is giving Mars “its first thorough checkup since it formed 4.5 billion years ago”.
The first mission of its kind, it uses data sent back from the lander which touched down last November.
Attree and Stirling colleague Dr Axel Hagermann are using information from a heat flow probe as the basis for their work alongside numerical models to estimate the effect that freak climate changes in the past may have on its measurements.
Named HP3, the device was built by the German Aerospace Centre and is designed to burrow up to five metres into the Martian soil.
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That allows it to go three times further than any previous hardware has gone and should help scientists gain new insights about the heat flow from the planet’s interior.
It is hoped that by combining the rate of heat flow with other InSight data, the team will be able to work out how energy within the planet drives changes on the surface above.
This includes planetary evolution and the shaping of mountains and canyons.
Attree said: “The magnitude of the heat flow tells us about the Martian deep interior and helps to create formation and evolution models.
“If historical climate change has led to more or less excess heat stored in the subsurface, it could influence HP3’s results.”
He went on: “Small changes caused by climate change are unlikely to be picked up by HP3.
“However, it may be possible to detect very large changes – and this is important because we may be able to carry out similar measurements on other planets.”
Hagermann added: “We have demonstrated that it is not only historical changes in air temperature but also changes in air pressure and thermal conductivity of the soil that could be detectable, which might also be relevant for Earth, where borehole temperature measurements have played an important part in reconstructing past climates.”
The team’s latest study paper is published in the specialist journal, Planetary and Space Science.
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