Mysterious dark streaks crossing MarchThe surface area may not be the result of running water after all, suggests a new analysis of artificial intelligence (AI).
The sequences, first observed running along the Mars cliffs and the crater walls by NasaThe Viking mission in 1976 has long thought that scientists have formed following the flow of ancient water through the surface of the planet now mainly dried up.
But an AI algorithm trained on the observations of slope streaks revealed a different origin for streaks – probably formed from wind and dust, not water. The results, published on May 19 in the journal Nature communicationsCould have important implications on the place where humans choose to explore Mars and the places they are looking for for evidence of possible ancient life.
“This is the advantage of this Big Data approach”, co-author of the study Adomas Valantinasa planetary scientist at Brown University, said in a press release. “It helps us exclude certain orbit hypotheses before sending spaces to explore.”
The clamping lines are darker than the surrounding Martian soil and extend over hundreds of meters downhill. The shorter lifespan of these characteristics is called recurrent slope lineae (RSL), and do not arise regularly during the warmer spells of March.
This has led some planetary scientists to suggest that seasonal temperature fluctuations could melt ice or frozen aquifers or wet air, sending salt water streams that flow the planet’s craters. If this was true, this would arouse these regions of particular interest for future Mars missions.
In relation: Curiosity Rover finds the biggest carbon channels on Mars from rock, 3.7 billion billion,
To investigate, scientists behind the study trained an automatic learning algorithm on confirmed sequences observations before passing it through 86,000 satellite images to create a card of 500,000 sequence characteristics.
“Once we had this global card, we were able to compare it to databases and catalogs of other things such as temperature, wind speed, hydration, activity of the rock slide and other factors.” Said Bickel. “Then we could look for correlations on hundreds of thousands of cases to better understand the conditions in which these characteristics are formed.”
Using the map, scientists have found that the streaks were most likely to form in places where wind speed and dust deposit were high, suggesting that they came from fine sliding dust with steep slopes.
Other studies have underlined evidence of water And even life on Mars. If the results of the study resist, they could serve as a guide to sift the useful tracks of the red planet and its red herring.