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poisoned planet

08.07.2002

Before you send a man to Mars, you need to find out if Martian dust is poisonous. So says the US National Science Council.

The fact is that the Pathfinder research robot that roamed Mars five years ago found a rather high content of chromium in the dust, and some measurement results suggest that this may be its poisonous hexavalent form. On Earth, it is practically absent in nature, but it is obtained by some chemical processes in industry and poisons water bodies and soil if waste saturated with chromates (hexavalent chromium salts) gets there. Chromium makes up about 0,2 percent of Martian dust.

Before sending a ship with a crew to the Red Planet (although NASA does not yet have specific plans in this regard), it is necessary to find out whether the content of chromates in the dust is high. The acceptable threshold is not higher than 0,015 percent. It is also important how small the dust particles are. During the stay of the American landing modules on the Moon, the smallest lunar dust penetrated into the seemingly airtight lunar compartments. But they were on the moon no longer than three days, and it's good that this dust was not toxic.

The Martian expedition will remain on the planet much longer - it makes no sense to fly almost a year one way to wrap up all the cases in three days.

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