In 2004, NASA’s Mars exploration rover ‘Opportunity’ discovered a number of small spheres on the planet, informally named Martian blueberries. Opportunity’s mini spectrometers studied the mineralogy and famous they had been manufactured from iron oxide compounds referred to as haematites. This brought about pleasure, because the presence of haematites means that there was water current on Mars.
“The widely accepted formation mechanism of haematite concretion [hard solid mass] is precipitation from aqueous fluids. Haematite is known to form in oxidising environments, and based on our experience on Earth, we infer that water must have also played a crucial role in the formation of grey haematite on Mars,” explains Dwijesh Ray from the Planetary Sciences Division of Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad in an electronic mail to The Hindu. He has been finding out haematite concretions in Kutch. His latest paper notes that the ‘blueberries’ in India and Mars share comparable traits.
Jhuran formation
The crew has been finding out the Jhuran formation in Gujarat which is between 145 and 201 million years outdated. Detailed geochemistry and spectroscopic investigations of the haematite concretions on this space revealed that they resemble those on Mars. They have comparable morphology – spherical, typically doublet and triplet – and comparable mineralogy – a combination of haematite and goethite. The outcomes had been revealed in Planetary and Space Science.
“The haematites on Mars not just show the presence of water, they also indicate that the planet had an atmosphere with oxygen as haematites need oxygen to stabilise. We do not know if the concentration was high enough to permit lifeforms, but there was indeed more oxygen than the present day scenario,” explains Saibal Gupta from the Department of Geology and Geophysics at IIT Kharagpur, one of many authors of the paper.
About the age of the ‘blueberries’ on Mars, he explains: “The exact time correlation is not possible. Water is believed to have disappeared from Mars rocks about three billion years ago. Studies from the newly landed Perseverance rover may help find new clues and signs of life and other organic compounds, thus helping us paint a detailed picture of the history of Mars.”
Martian analogue
Several researchers have proven that the Kutch space is a potential Martian analogue locality. A 2016 paper argued that the occurrences of hydrous sulphate within the Matanumadh space of Kutch, resemble Martian surficial processes. It has been additionally argued that the transformation from the moist and humid to dry and arid surroundings on Mars is mimicked by the historical past of Kutch. Dr. Ray explains that there could also be a number of different localities in Kutch that share a geologic historical past of the floor to near-surface processes that seem to besimilar to historic Mars. “The concretions in the Jhuran Formation of Kutch represent another data point that reinforces the need to use the Kutch area for further analogue studies of the Martian surface ,” he says. The paper concludes that the Kutch space is also a potential testing web site for finishing up future Mars exploration research on Earth.
