02-September-2008, 08:58 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: The beautiful north coast (Ohio)
Posts: 17,774
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This blog offers some thoughts on how perchlorates may have formed on Mars, assuming they formed there (not some rocket contaminant).
Quote:
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Alternatively, the perchlorates may have been formed on Mars. In the lab, perchlorates can be created by evaporating the right kind of acid. However, perchlorate salts also occur naturally in Earth in extremely arid environments, like the Atacama desert in Chile. One study has shown that these salts can form by exposing typical chloride salts (think NaCl) to sunlight or ultraviolet light for long periods of time (months). This is a pretty appealing case for Mars, since certain salts that often form with chloride salts have been detected all over the north polar region (ref: my thesis!), and the surface of Mars receives a ton of UV through the thin atmosphere.
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