Assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Washington at St. Louis, Kun Wang said that Mars is too small to support life. “The fate of Mars was predetermined from the start,” he was quoted as saying Space.com.
Wang said there may be a threshold on the size requirements of rocky planets to hold enough water to allow for habitability and plate tectonics. And scientists believe that the threshold must be larger than Mars.
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The study team led by Zhen Tian, a graduate student in Wang’s lab examined 20 Martian meteorites, which they chose to represent the mass composition of the Red Planet. The researchers measured the abundance of various potassium isotopes in these space rocks, which are between 200 million years and four billion years old.
They found that Mars lost significantly more volatiles during its formation than Earth, which is about nine times larger than the Red Planet. The finding of correlation of K isotope composition with planetary gravity is a new discovery.
The study, published online Monday September 20, 2021 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, suggests that the small size may make the planet uninhabitable.
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“This study emphasizes that a very limited size for a planet to have enough water in is insufficient to develop a habitable surface environment,” co-author Klaus Mezger, of the Center for Space and Habitability at the University of Bern in Switzerland, said in the same statement.
“These results will guide astronomers in their search for extraterrestrial planets that can be inhabited in other solar systems,” he said.
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