Researchers affirm that we must examine the ice of Mars to find life.

The researchers who affirm this analyzed the survival capacity of bacteria and microbes in the Martian environment and specifically in the ice of Mars. I'm going to enlarge this photo a little.

The photo was taken by NASA's Phoenix mission in 2008, it landed in a region near the north pole and the white is the ice that is seen under a layer of dust, on Mars there are enormous amounts of water ice under the surface, there are snowy passages in the polar areas on the surface, it is not seen on the surface outside the poles, the Korolev crater is an immense crater full of water ice, for example, it is in the regions polar, near the pole.

But when you move away from the poles, things change, at the poles the cold is very intense and there can be ice on the outside, but outside the poles, I mean, things change, the temperatures are a little "warmer", because the average temperature of Mars is currently -65 degrees Celsius, although closer to the equator you could easily be in summer at positive 20 degrees Celsius, yes, you could lie down in the sun calmly with your space suit, obviously, and you would be around 20 degrees positive, although when night comes the temperatures, even at the Equator and in summer, drop to -80º, this is due to the thin atmospheric layer that exists on Mars, which causes heat to quickly escape from the planet.

The atmosphere on a planet acts like a blanket that retains heat, the average temperature of the Earth is positive 15 degrees Celsius, but if we did not have an atmosphere, imagine a supernova explosion that tears off the Earth's atmosphere, for example, in that case, the average temperature of the Earth, even if we were closer to the Sun, on an Earth without an atmosphere, would be -18 degrees Celsius.

The above would be an explanation for the global glaciations, for the snowball earth, a supernova explosion that started or that at the time took off the Earth's atmosphere or a large part of the Earth's atmosphere causing the temperature to plummet to -18ºC. What I want to make clear to you is that the atmospheres act like a blanket, in the case of the Earth it would be a warm duvet, a Nordic duvet that protects us and gives us warmth, and in Mars is as if they only had a blanket to protect themselves from the cold, from the space where they are located, plus they are further away from the sun.

This combination of temperatures and lack of atmospheric pressure causes the ice on the surface of Mars, far from the polar regions, to end up sublimating, that is, going from the solid to the gaseous state without going through the liquid state. Therefore, when a meteorite hits the surface of Mars and brings out blocks of ice that were under that Martian surface, those blocks of ice end up disappearing after a short time, perhaps they last a few years, but not much longer.

Another thing that contributes to the ice being below the surface are dust storms, which in some cases acquire a global character and end up burying the ice, but the issue is that we have a large amount of water ice under the Martian surface. It turns out that the study that is now in the news, carried out by researchers from Pennsylvania State University and NASA, suggests that fragments of biomolecules from ancient Martian microbes could survive perfectly in the Martian ice for tens of millions of years, enough time for future missions. can find them.

How did they come to this conclusion? In the experiment, the researchers frozen samples of the Escherichia coli bacteria, yes, do not think that Escherichia coli is a special, rare bacteria with superpowers, a tardigrade type in a bacteria version, no, it is one of the most common bacteria in the world. In fact, we all have it within ourselves, it is part of our intestinal flora and it is in all feces. There are many variants, most are beneficial and allow us to digest, although there are some strains that can be very dangerous.

They took this bacteria from feces and subjected it to two different environments, pure water ice and a mixture of water and ingredients present in Martian soil, including silicate rocks, and clay, etc., and they froze them to -51.1ºC, which is the typical temperature, the frozen regions of Mars, and then they exposed the samples to levels of radiation equivalent to what those samples would experience for 20 million years on Mars.

The results were expanded by modeling to represent 50 years of 50 million years of exposure, the result was that in the pure water ice, subjected to that concentrated pressure of 50 million years of radiation and the Martian environment in a simulation plan, but the beast, they found that more than 10% of the amino acids, the molecular components of the proteins of the Escherichia coli samples survived the simulation of 50 million years, while in the samples that contained Mars-like sediments degraded 10 times faster and not all survived.

Christopher House, co-author of the study and professor of geosciences, said that "50 million years is much older than the expected age for some ice deposits on the current surfaces of Mars," which are often about 2 million years old, is what they calculate, which means that any organic life present in the ice would be preserved and it also means that if there are bacteria near the surface of Mars, future missions could find them, because we are talking about drilling on Mars is very complicated, but there is a possibility that bacteria exist. Martians that have arisen when Mars was a planet with water, with rivers, it rained and was warmer than today, about 3 billion years ago and that have survived under those ice layers.

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