Flowing, salty water has been discovered on Mars during the planet’s warmest season, NASA confirms. This announcement came following a weekend’s worth of teasers by NASA to pique interest in the report.
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Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program, said scientists haven’t been able to figure out, until now, the “waxing and waning of these dark streaks on the surface”. But given that liquid water is so fundamental to life, the discovery could have major ramifications for the further search for life, in some form, on Mars.
He stated that the findings are proof that the dark streaks on Mars are water.
Bruce Betts, science director of The Planetary Society, told KNX 1070 NEWSRADIO scientists are still working to better understand the conditions in which liquid water can thrive on Mars. The discovery of water on Mars has nearly become a joke among planetary scientists.
“Our rovers has taken soil samples and we’ve found them to be moist and full of water”. The results were confirmed by orbital spectrometry, which detected the presence of chlorine salts responsible for keeping the water in its liquid form.
The discovery was made when scientists developed a new technique to analyze chemical maps of the surface of Mars obtained by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. “The more evidence we find of it, the more encouraged I am for future Mars missions”.
“It’s only when these streaks are biggest and widest that we see evidence for molecular water”, says Lujendra Ojha, a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The liquid is really “hydrated salts”, but for all intents and purposes, NASA’s calling it water.
“We have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected”, said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The planet, with a gravity of just 1 percent that of Earth, lost its water, and the extreme cold meant little could live there.
HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen said it was “very likely” there was life somewhere in the Martian crust, although he tempered expectations by saying the life would most probably be microbial. The liquid appears to run down canyon walls during Mars’ summer months, according to The Guardian.
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The source of the water is still not known, but scientists believe that it may stem from underground ice or salty aquifers, or condense out of the thin Martian atmosphere.
