Thanks for the lead. I'd missed those posts.
Quote:
Originally Posted by geonuc
I believe there has been discussion of perchlorate in the Phoenix on Mars thread.
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Perhaps I'm just not seeing it, but I could not find any discussion of the origin of the perchlorate. The closest I found was a link to another article with the assertion, "In nature perchlorates form photochemically in the atmosphere, and then settle randomly on a planetary surface." I have found papers reporting preliminary evidence for the photochemical formation of perchlorate
on Earth from chlorine/oxygen precursors, but it seems a stretch to extrapolate to Mars, and it raises the question of where the precursors would have come from.