This will be Mars with oceans and plants

Mars is the great target of the space race. It will return to the Moon as part of the Artemis program, but this clearly focuses on the subsequent arrival to Mars, which is the main challenge for the aerospace industry.

We won’t be able to see a file red planet (which would certainly no longer be called that if it had preserved its water and vegetation) as a garden even if man reached its surface at some point, but we can get an idea of ​​what it was like in its best moments thanks to the various recreations.

How did Mars lose its water?

There are many theories about this, none of which have been 100% proven yet. Most are based on the principle that water disappeared from Mars when it lost the magnetic field that protects it from strong solar winds, when it was blown away by high-intensity solar winds and trapped as ice below the surface.

Another research done by scientists from the Department of Earth Sciences in Oxford university In the United Kingdom and published a few years ago, established the hypothesis that Basalt rocks absorb water from Mars Which, unlike terrestrial stones, is rich in iron oxide, and therefore can hold approximately 25% more water inside compared to basalt rocks on Earth.

“There is a lot of evidence that there is. [agua]: Sedimentary Structures, Appearing River Valleys, Wet Minerals, and Possibly an Ocean Basin (Northern 40% of Mars could be an ancient ocean basin that dried up) »It was included in the list by John Wade, the study’s lead author.

Nili Fossae region of Mars (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

The study simulates the interaction of water with the mineral composition of the rocks, including factors such as the temperature of the rocks and pressure, and the result is clear: due to its chemical composition, the absorption of water on Mars was inevitable. In the mantle as a result of the interaction of its rocks with surface water.

The oceans and plants of Mars

If there was water, many imagined what it would have looked like if it had given rise to vegetation. In this sense, we find the work of engineer Kevin Gill, currently a software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JSL) working on data analysis and visualization projects, who was able to recreate what the Red Planet would be like in a hypothesis like «green and blue planet“More earth-like.

He did it using his own software, jDem846It is a geospatial software application designed to produce high quality images of 2D and 3D digital elevation models. He chose (based on NASA studies) which parts of the high surface would be land and which would be oceans.

The result was as follows:

Recreation of the oceans of Mars (west side)

Mars Oceans Recreation (East Side)

For desert areas, use motifs taken from the Sahara and parts of Australia. For frozen parts, it was based on regions of Russia, and for plants, it used resources from the regions of South America and Africa.