Episode 176 A notably red slab of rock with some even more notable features has been the target of intense investigation for the past two weeks. Now Perseverance has dug into it with its abrading tool and opened up a deeper level of intrigue.
Episode 176 A notably red slab of rock with some even more notable features has been the target of intense investigation for the past two weeks. Now Perseverance has dug into it with its abrading tool and opened up a deeper level of intrigue.
Very late reply - but your question is totally fair, so I hope you don’t mind:
On the face of it, you’d expect Martian groundwater to be pretty damned poor in dissolved oxygen, yes, and groundwater on Earth does get its oxygen almost entirely from the atmosphere, as you mentioned. (This would be easier on Earth than Mars due to the greater atmospheric pressure, among other things.) However:
If you’ve heard anything about recent discoveries of “dark oxygen” being generated on Earth’s deep seafloor, you might agree with me that nature often finds a way to create chemical niches where interesting stuff happens. In the just-discovered terrestrial case, metals on the seafloor are essentially acting as batteries, zapping water and splitting the oxygen off from the hydrogen. Obviously I can’t expect that this process was occurring at the Jezero Delta, but I’m cautious about saying that the groundwater there never had any dissolved oxygen, especially when we know that hot water can break down minerals and release the oxygen within.
So again, the question is a good one, but it’s already been partially answered by Curiosity, which found the following on the floor of Gale Crater:
Good article to read if you have the time…