RCoM and Martian Percholates

You may or may not have heard of the NASA's Phoenix which landed on Mars's northern polar regions earlier this year. One of its discoveries was that there are percholates on Mars.

Here is what one blog (martianchronicles.wordpress.com), reporting recently (16 December 2008) on a meeting of planetary scientists, had to say about them.

"Perchlorates are found on [E]arth in very arid environments like the Atacama desert in Chile, and are measured in grams per hectare. For comparison, at the Phoenix landing site, Hecht said that it would only take a few handfuls of martian soil to get a gram of perchlorate."

Elsewhere he went on:

"Another aspect of perchlorate that I thought was interesting is that it is used as an oxidizer for rocket fuel, since it gives off oxygen when heated. This makes it a potential resource for future Mars missions: astronauts could manufacture their own oxygen just by cooking the soil...."

When I read that I thought at once of RCoM and those Martian rocks Kit Draper finds which give off oxygen when heated!