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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday October 01 2016, @07:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the mars-farts dept.

NASA's Curiosity rover has found evidence that chemistry in the surface material on Mars contributed dynamically to the makeup of its atmosphere over time. It's another clue that the history of the Red Planet's atmosphere is more complex and interesting than a simple legacy of loss.

The findings come from the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, instrument suite, which studied the gases xenon and krypton in Mars' atmosphere. The two gases can be used as tracers to help scientists investigate the evolution and erosion of the Martian atmosphere. A lot of information about xenon and krypton in Mars' atmosphere came from analyses of Martian meteorites and measurements made by the Viking mission.

"What we found is that earlier studies of xenon and krypton only told part of the story," said Pamela Conrad, lead author of the report and SAM's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "SAM is now giving us the first complete in situ benchmark against which to compare meteorite measurements."

Of particular interest to scientists are the ratios of certain isotopes - or chemical variants - of xenon and krypton. The SAM team ran a series of first-of-a-kind experiments to measure all the isotopes of xenon and krypton in the Martian atmosphere. The experiments are described in a paper published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The data is expected to add to our understanding of how a planet's atmosphere evolves.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @11:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @11:26AM (#409042)

    i don't know if it applies in this particular instance, but when editors are processing stories they have to manually select both the time and date of release. It is fairly easy to miss the date field which defaults to the current day, thus the selected time of release might be in the past. Once the editor saves the story it goes out live very quickly. When the error is spotted, the editor re-edits the story and quickly changes the date field, in which case the story is only 'released' for a short while before the correction removes it again.

    Of course, with the level of expertise that I and the other editors have this is very unlikely to happen, and I have never done it personally.... well, not so far today anyway.