Deliquescing salts taking up moisture from the Mars atmosphere: Difference between revisions

[[File:Ice on Mars Utopia Planitia (PIA00571).jpg|frame|center|600px|alt=Ice on Mars Utopia Planitia |Ice on Mars Utopia Planitia. These frosts formed every morning for about 100 days a year at the Viking location. Scientists believe dust particles in the atmosphere pick up bits of solid water. That combination is not heavy enough to settle to the ground. But carbon dioxide, which makes up 95 percent of the Martian atmosphere, freezes and adheres to the particles and they become heavy enough to sink. Warmed by the Sun, the surface evaporates the carbon dioxide and returns it to the atmosphere, leaving behind the water and dust.<br><br>The ice seen in this picture, is extremely thin, perhaps no more than one-thousandth of an inch thick. These frosts form due to the high night time humidity, which may also make it possible for perchlorate salt mixtures to capture humidity from the atmosphere, and this process could occur almost anywhere on Mars where suitable mixtures of salts exist.]]

 

 

Some microbes on the Earth are able to survive in dry habitats without any ice or water, using only liquid obtained by deliquescence. For instance this happens in salt pillars in the hyper arid core of the Atacama desert. They can do this at a remarkably low relative humidity, presumably making use of deliquescence of the salts.<ref name=Osanasaltpillars>Osano, A., and A. F. Davila. [http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2014/pdf/2919.pdf "Analysis of Photosynthetic Activity of Cyanobacteria Inhabiting Halite Evaporites of Atacama Desert, Chile."] Lunar and Planetary Institute Science Conference Abstracts. Vol. 45. 2014.</ref>