Mars Might Have Enough Oxygen to Support Extraterrestrial Life

According to the latest research, the Red Planet, Mars’ salty water just beneath the surface of the Red Planet could hold enough oxygen to house the same type of microbial life that has emerged and evolved on Earth billions of years ago, as some scientists admitted in a recent study.

There might be life on Mars

“We discovered that brines, water with high concentrations of salt, on Mars could contain enough oxygen for microbes to breathe,” said the study’s leading author Vlada Stamenkovic, a theoretical physicist at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in California. “This fully revolutionizes our understanding of the potential for life on Mars, today and in the past,” Vlada said.

“We never thought that oxygen could play a role for life on Mars due to its rarity in the atmosphere, about 0.14 percent,” explained Stamenkovic.

Mars might possess oxygen on its surface

However, on Earth, the aerobic form of life on Earth developed along with photosynthesis, a process that’s turning CO2 into O2. The gas was vital for the emergence of complex life, especially noteworthy a few decades after the so-called Great Oxygenation Event some 2.35 billion years ago.

But our planet also harbors microbes, at the bottom of the ocean, in boiling hot springs, that subsist in environments deprived of oxygen. “That’s why, whenever we thought of life on Mars, we studied the potential for anaerobic life,” said Stamenkovic.

Caltech researchers calculated the amount of oxygen that could be dissolved in Mars salt water considering some of the main variables that control the process of absorption of the gas, such as temperature, the concentration of salt compounds, nature of dissolved salts, and latitude. According to the new study, Mars might house Martian life forms, including microbes and sponges, in the area of the Red Planet that might hold enough oxygen, as reported by CanadiaHomesteading.