Hasta La Gadget!

It’s possible that the Red Planet wasn’t always red.

New research has found a compelling explanation for Mars’ trademark rusty color, according to Space.com. Drawing data from NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers, scientists are theorizing that the red color is a relatively new development due to the erosion of rocks on the planet’s surface, yielding a red mineral that stains the dust, the report said.

It turns out it’s something we could replicate on Earth. Here’s how it works, according to Jonathan Merrison of the Aarhus Mars Simulation Laboratory in Denmark: seal samples of quartz sand in flask flasks, and then tumble them over and over again. The process simulates gentle winds on the surface of Mars, and reduces about 10 percent of the grains to rust over a period of seven months. Then, add powdered magnetite–an iron oxide found on the red planet–and watch the sand become red as it continues to tumble in the flasks.

“We think we have a process that explains how the dust became red without liquid water, which doesn’t seem to fit in with the data,” Merrison said in the report. “Before this work, I think most people in the field kind of thought the Martian surface was billions of years old and had always been red. This work seems to imply that it could be quite recent – millions of years instead of billions of years.” (Image credit: NASA)