This handout photo obtained on June 10, 2024 courtesy of ESA shows a 3D model of the Olympus Mons volcano on Mars, as observed by the HRSC camera aboard ESA's Mars Express. (Photo by Adomas Valantinas / AFP)
This handout photo obtained on June 10, 2024 courtesy of ESA shows a 3D model of the Olympus Mons volcano on Mars, as observed by the HRSC camera aboard ESA's Mars Express. (Photo by Adomas Valantinas / AFP)
Early morning frost has been detected on the peaks of massive volcanoes on Mars, an unexpected discovery about the dispersal of water on Mars that could one day prove essential for human exploration, scientists said.
The early morning frost was spotted in images taken by the European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter, according to a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The immense volcanoes are in the Tharsis plateau, an elevated region nearly 5,000 kilometers wide near the Martian equator.
The volcanoes have been extinct for millions of years. Among them is the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, which is almost three times taller than Mount Everest.
The discovery came by chance -- no one expected to find frost in this region.
"We thought it was impossible for frost to form around Mars's equator," lead study author Adomas Valantinas said in a statement.
Plenty of sunshine and a thin atmosphere mean the temperature is relatively warm up there, "unlike what we see on Earth, where you might expect to see frosty peaks," the researcher at Brown University in the United States said in a statement.
There is also little water in the atmosphere near the Martian equator, making condensation less likely.
"Other space probes have observed frost but in wetter regions -- notably the northern plains," study co-author Frederic Schmidt of France's Paris-Saclay University told AFP.
The Trace Gas Orbiter, which has been orbiting Mars since 2018, was able to take images when the first rays of the Sun crossed over the tops of the volcanoes.
"We saw a shiny, blue deposit there, a particular texture that we only see in the early morning and during the cold seasons," Schmidt said.
The layer of the ice is only the thickness of a hair -- and it does not last long.
But there is about 150,000 tons of water -- equivalent to 60 Olympic swimming pools -- in the daily frost at the summits of volcanoes Olympus Mons, Arsia Mons, Ascraeus Mons and Ceraunius Tholus, the ESA said.
The researchers suggested the frost is caused by a micro-climate that forms inside the calderas of the huge volcanoes.
As wind whips up the sides of the volcanoes, it brings "relatively moist air from near the surface up to higher altitudes, where it condenses and settles as frost," study co-author Nicolas Thomas explained.
"We actually see this happening on Earth and other parts of Mars," said Thomas, who works on the Trace Gas Orbiter's imaging system.
Modelling how these frosts form "could allow scientists to reveal more of Mars's remaining secrets, including where water exists and how it moves between reservoirs," the ESA said.
This may prove crucial for planned missions that could see humans set foot on Martian soil.
"We could recover water from the frost for human consumption, or launch rockets from Mars by separating the oxygen and hydrogen molecules," Schmidt said.
Mapping the location of water on Mars -- which only exists as ice or vapor -- could also be key in the search for signs of extra-terrestrial life.
Liquid water is considered one of the essential ingredients for life on other planets.
5 Things We Know and Still Don’t Know about COVID, 5 Years after It Appearedhttps://english.aawsat.com/varieties/5097458-5-things-we-know-and-still-don%E2%80%99t-know-about-covid-5-years-after-it-appeared
A medical worker takes a swab sample from a worker of the China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) company during a round of COVID-19 tests in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, Aug. 5, 2021. (Chinatopix via AP, File)
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5 Things We Know and Still Don’t Know about COVID, 5 Years after It Appeared
A medical worker takes a swab sample from a worker of the China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT) company during a round of COVID-19 tests in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, Aug. 5, 2021. (Chinatopix via AP, File)
Five years ago, a cluster of people in Wuhan, China, fell sick with a virus never before seen in the world.
The germ didn't have a name, nor did the illness it would cause. It wound up setting off a pandemic that exposed deep inequities in the global health system and reshaped public opinion about how to control deadly emerging viruses.
The virus is still with us, though humanity has built up immunity through vaccinations and infections. It's less deadly than it was in the pandemic's early days and it no longer tops the list of leading causes of death. But the virus is evolving, meaning scientists must track it closely.
Where did the SARS-CoV-2 virus come from? We don’t know. Scientists think the most likely scenario is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses. They think it then infected another species, probably racoon dogs, civet cats or bamboo rats, which in turn infected humans handling or butchering those animals at a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared in late November 2019.
That's a known pathway for disease transmission and likely triggered the first epidemic of a similar virus, known as SARS. But this theory has not been proven for the virus that causes COVID-19. Wuhan is home to several research labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling debate over whether the virus instead may have leaked from one.
It's a difficult scientific puzzle to crack in the best of circumstances. The effort has been made even more challenging by political sniping around the virus' origins and by what international researchers say are moves by China to withhold evidence that could help.
The true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.
People attend an exhibition on the city's fight against the coronavirus in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, Jan. 23, 2021. (AP)
How many people died from COVID-19? Probably more than 20 million. The World Health Organization has said member countries reported more than 7 million deaths from COVID-19, but the true death toll is estimated to be at least three times higher.
In the US, an average of about 900 people a week have died of COVID-19 over the past year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The coronavirus continues to affect older adults the most. Last winter in the US, people aged 75 and older accounted for about half the nation’s COVID-19 hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths, according to the CDC.
"We cannot talk about COVID in the past, since it’s still with us," WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
What vaccines were made available? Scientists and vaccine-makers broke speed records developing COVID-19 vaccines that have saved tens of millions of lives worldwide – and were the critical step to getting life back to normal.
Less than a year after China identified the virus, health authorities in the US and Britain cleared vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna. Years of earlier research — including Nobel-winning discoveries that were key to making the new technology work — gave a head start for so-called mRNA vaccines.
Today, there’s also a more traditional vaccine made by Novavax, and some countries have tried additional options. Rollout to poorer countries was slow but the WHO estimates more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally since 2021.
The vaccines aren't perfect. They do a good job of preventing severe disease, hospitalization and death, and have proven very safe, with only rare serious side effects. But protection against milder infection begins to wane after a few months.
Like flu vaccines, COVID-19 shots must be updated regularly to match the ever-evolving virus — contributing to public frustration at the need for repeated vaccinations. Efforts to develop next-generation vaccines are underway, such as nasal vaccines that researchers hope might do a better job of blocking infection.
This undated electron microscope image made available by the US National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, pink, cultured in the lab. (NIAID-RML via AP, File)
Which variant is dominating now? Genetic changes called mutations happen as viruses make copies of themselves. And this virus has proven to be no different.
Scientists named these variants after Greek letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and omicron. Delta, which became dominant in the US in June 2021, raised a lot of concerns because it was twice as likely to lead to hospitalization as the first version of the virus.
Then in late November 2021, a new variant came on the scene: omicron.
"It spread very rapidly," dominating within weeks, said Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist in Texas. "It drove a huge spike in cases compared to anything we had seen previously."
But on average, the WHO said, it caused less severe disease than delta. Scientists believe that may be partly because immunity had been building due to vaccination and infections.
"Ever since then, we just sort of keep seeing these different subvariants of omicron accumulating more different mutations," Long said. "Right now, everything seems to locked on this omicron branch of the tree."
The omicron relative now dominant in the US is called XEC, which accounted for 45% of variants circulating nationally in the two-week period ending Dec. 21, the CDC said. Existing COVID-19 medications and the latest vaccine booster should be effective against it, Long said, since "it’s really sort of a remixing of variants already circulating."
Employees disinfect streets and shops inside Istanbul's famous Grand Bazaar to prevent the spread of coronavirus. (EPA)
What do we know about long COVID? Millions of people remain in limbo with a sometimes disabling, often invisible, legacy of the pandemic called long COVID.
It can take several weeks to bounce back after a bout of COVID-19, but some people develop more persistent problems. The symptoms that last at least three months, sometimes for years, include fatigue, cognitive trouble known as "brain fog," pain and cardiovascular problems, among others.
Doctors don’t know why only some people get long COVID. It can happen even after a mild case and at any age, although rates have declined since the pandemic's early years. Studies show vaccination can lower the risk.
It also isn't clear what causes long COVID, which complicates the search for treatments. One important clue: Increasingly researchers are discovering that remnants of the coronavirus can persist in some patients’ bodies long after their initial infection, although that can’t explain all cases.
