Science

NASA: There may be Granite Present on the Red Planet

We all are aware of what Mars is! It's the second smallest planet in our solar system. It covers three planets from the sun. It is described as the Red planet and its name Mars is named after the Roman god of war. As the iron oxide is ubiquitous on its surface it appears to be red in color and that's why it is called red planet. Considering the whole solar system Mars is the only one which has the largest volcanoes. It has Olympus Mons around 600 km in distance, ample enough to cover the entire state of New Mexico. It is kind of a guard volcano; it includes slopes that rise progressively which were formed due to the eruption of lava that flowed before solidifying for a long distances. These are seen by Mars images relieved from NASA.

Study bolsters the confirmation for presence of granite on the Mars; analysis has been done of a large volcano on Mars that was active for billions of years with the help of remote sensing techniques with infrared spectroscopy. This volcano is free from dust, that's why it can be studied ideally. Most of the volcanoes there are covered with dust, but this volcano, found is dust free with the help of some fastest-moving sand dunes on Mars, it sweep away the dust that might fall on the volcano. Looking at the inside of that volcano the team found rich deposits of feldspar, no doubt which was a great surprise for them also. It was so because feldspar is the mineral found in granite, at a greater extent. Additional, natural resources that are common in basalts that are affluent in magnesium and iron must omnipresent, are almost entirely missing at this site. That position of the feldspar also gives a justification for formation of granite over there. Granite or its eruptive alike Rhyolite is found on Earth a lot in tectonically active regions such as subduction zones. Which is doubtful on Mars, but on the other hand the research team accomplished that extended magmatic actions on Mars can produce these compositions in huge extent.

As there are quarries seen on our planet, they can be seen on the Mars as well. James Wray said “We’re providing the most compelling evidence to date that Mars has granitic rocks” who is an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the study’s lead author. The research was published this November on 17th in the Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature Geo science. The work was supported by the NASA Mars Data Analysis Program.

Using the kind of infrared spectroscopic technique we were using, you shouldn’t really be able to detect feldspar minerals, unless there’s really, really a lot of feldspar and very little of the dark minerals that you get in basalt” Wray said. As magma cools in the subsurface of Mars, it undergoes a process called fractionation, and then based on density the diverse components of the molten rock split up. Thus the crystal which is denser gets collected at the bottom, leaving the lighter materials on the top. This procedure is occasionally referred to as igneous distillation. In which the distillation increasingly enriches the melt in silica, which creates the melt, and the rock eventually which possesses lower density and also the physical properties similar to that of granite.

Later then Wray said that “We think some of the volcanoes on Mars were sporadically active for billions of years, it seems plausible that in a volcano you could get enough iterations of that reprocessing that you could form something like granite.” The above lines might give evidence of granite being present on the mars, so people buckle up and get ready to discover the Mars. It is good for those who crave to build their home on mars as they would have no problems in transporting granite for the use of building material in their homes.

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