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User:Robertinventor/Draft email on o2 on Mars

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Dear Vlada Stamenković

Hi, I was fascinated by your recent research paper about the prospects for oxygen rich brines on Mars, perhaps even enough for simple animals such as sponges. I'm a science blogger who often writes blog posts on my Science 2.0 blog and on Quora about astrobiology and planetary protection, and a volunteer reporter for Wikinews.

I am writing an article about your research right now, which will be submitted for review to the Wikinews site. See our Wikinews:Mission statement. I am required by Wikinews to say that I am an independent reporter and do not represent the Wikimedia foundation. I will also add the article to Science2.0.com and to my Astrobiology wiki, where it does not require peer review and would be published immediately.

After reading your paper and the other online articles about it from Scientific American, National Geographic etc, I had a few questions which I could not find answers to in those sources, or in the Caltech press release.

Here are my questions and I will much appreciate it if you have time to answer:

  • Have you looked into possibilities for the oxygen to get into the subglacial lakes at the poles? Could these potentially be highly oxygenated like lake Vostok?
  • The temperatures for the highest levels of oxygen are really low -133 C, so, is the idea that this oxygen would be retained when the brines warm up to more habitable temperatures during the day or seasonally? Or would the oxygen be lost as it warms up? Or - is the idea that it has to be some exotic biochemistry that works only at ultra low temperatures like Dirk Schulze-Makuch's life based on hydrogen peroxide and perchlorates internal to the cells as antifreeze?
  • How quickly would the oxygen get into the brines - did you investigate the timescale?
  • Could the brines that Nilton Renno and his teams simulated forming on salt / ice interfaces within minutes in Mars simulation conditions get oxygenated in the process of formation? If not, how long would it take for them to get oxygenated to levels sufficient for aerobic microbes? For instance could the Phoenix leg droplets have taken up enough oxygen for aerobic respiration by microbes?
  • I notice from your figure 4 that there is enough oxygen for sponges only at tilts of about 45 degrees or less. Do you have any thoughts about how sponges could survive periods of time in the distant past when the Mars axial tilt exceeds 45 degrees, for instance, might there be subsurface oxygen rich oases in caves that recolonize the surface? Also what is the exact figure for the tilt at which oxygen levels sufficient for sponges become possible? (It looks like about 45 degrees from the figure but the paper doesn't seem to give a figure for this).
  • The article says that the highest levels of oxygen can be the same as for Earth's oceans, 0.2 moles per cubic meter. So, does your research suggest any potential for oases for more demanding life such as sea worms or even creatures with a backbone on present day Mars?
  • Phys.org quote you as saying: "I am a big promoter of looking for current habitable environments, and we can do that by starting to explore if there is liquid water on Mars. To that end, Stamenkovic is working to develop a new tool, no bigger than a shoe box, that could be used to find water on Mars and determine its salinity, no digging necessary. Can you say a bit about how this device would work. I can't find anything about it on the internet.
  • Do you have any plans to look at a more complex atmospheric model with seasonal and daily temperature and atmospheric pressure variations?
  • Any future conference talks on the topic we can mention for our readers?
  • Also interested in other plans for future research to build on your paper.
  • Are there any YouTube videos of a press conference or any radio interviews since the study that we can link to?
  • We are also interested in details about the researchers, their role in the study and if you have photographs of the researchers we can use in the article.
  • We'd like to use two of your figures in the article - Figure 3 (the map of variations in oxygen concentrations in potential brines) and Figure 4 (variation in oxygen concentration over past 20 million years and forwards 10 million years in the future). But they are behind a paywall. Is this publicly available under a suitable license, creative commons or similar? Or is there any publicly viewable article that has these figures that we can link to as a source?

If you have time to answer these questions it would be great.

thanks!

Robert (Walker)

Note: we will add a publicly viewable copy of relevant parts of our correspondence such as your answers to these questions to the collaboration page on Wikinews for other collaborators to view. Any personal details such as email addresses would be redacted. I hope this is okay with you.

An alternative is to forward all correspondence via email to the reviewer of the article.

I would also like to publish your answers to the questions in the format of an email interview on my astrobiology wiki and possibly on Wikinews, if this is acceptable to you.

The Wikinews article, in progress is here Cold salty water on Mars may have enough oxygen for air breathing microbes, possibly even simple animals like sponges

The extended article will be published here:

And as a new section in my online book on planetary protection and astrobiology here:

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