MeraForum Community.No 1 Pakistani Forum Community - Mars Soil Contains A Huge Amount Of Water

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If you heat up a cubic foot of Mars soil, you can harvest around two pints (one liter) of water.
According to new data returned by NASA’s Curiosity rover, this isn’t just a one-off lucky find, either:
It seems that most of the dirt on Mars harbors large amounts of water.
This is very exciting news for future human exploration of Mars, because it’s prohibitively difficult to transport water from the surface of Earth to the Red Planet — and, in one fell swoop, it also makes the eventual terraforming and colonization of Mars a lot more feasible.

This amazing finding comes from data gathered by Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) on-board laboratory, which performed a series of tests over a few weeks at the Rocknest site back in the fall of 2012.
The SAM contains three instruments — the Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer (QMS), Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS), and Gas Chromatograph (GC) — but it is the results from this last instrument, the GC, that we are most interested in.

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Results from Curiosity’s SAM/GC analysis of Martian soil. Note how much water there is.

Basically, the GC heats up a soil sample by passing hot (~835C, 1535F) helium gas over it, and then measures the gases that emerge.
In this case, by far the most common gas released (between 1.5% and 3% by weight) was water vapor.
Per cubic foot of Mars soil, this equates to a lot of water — around two pints, or almost a liter.

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A scoop of soil collected by Curiosity that contains between 1.5% and 3% water.

It’s not all good news, though.
Along with the large amount of water, SAM’s GC instrument also detected significant amounts of oxygen and chlorine, suggesting that up to 0.5% of the soil consists of perchlorate compounds.
Perchlorates are known to slow down human thyroid function, so it could be an issue for human explorers/settlers if there is a lot of perchlorate in the Martian atmosphere.

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These two findings come as part of the first five peer-reviewed papers published by Curiosity’s army of human scientists.
The other four papers tackle topics such as the pyramidal mugearite rock dubbed Jake Matijevic (pictured above), and delve further into analysis of Mars’s soil.
There has been some controversy over NASA’s decision to publish these papers in the paywalled journal Science, when all works of the federal government are explicitly excluded from copyright protection, and are generally published openly.