The study of Mars is a constant exercise in problem-solving, and NASA scientists have just been served up a doozy. Data from the Curiosity rover positioned within the planet’s Gale Crater has revealed wild seasonal swings in oxygen levels, something mission scientists neither expected or are able to explain.
“The first time we saw that, it was just mind boggling,” says Sushil Atreya, professor of climate and space sciences at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and author of the paper describing the discovery.
There are parallels between this and another Martian mystery to stump planetary scientists recently, massive seasonal spikes in atmospheric methane. Like the oxygen, these increases occur as a repeating pattern, and like oxygen, they differ slightly in how much methane they add to the atmosphere.
“We’re struggling to explain this,” says Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland who led this research. “The fact that the oxygen behavior isn’t perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it’s not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics. It has to be some chemical source and sink that we can’t yet account for.”
They might not have the answers yet, but they have do have some ideas. Martian soil is known to contain rich quantities of oxygen in the form of other compounds, so there is the possibility that certain springtime conditions could bring about huge releases from the surface. The next steps are to work out what this process could be.
https://newatlas.com/space/curiosity-rover-strange-oxygen-swings-mars/