A huge lake of salty water appears to be buried deep in Mars, raising the possibility of finding life on the red planet, scientists reported Wednesday.
The discovery, based on observations by a European spacecraft, generated excitement from experts. Water is essential to life as we know it, and scientists have long sought to prove that the liquid is present on Mars.
“If these researchers are right, this is the first time we’ve found evidence of a large water body on Mars,” said Cassie Stuurman, a geophysicist at the University of Texas who found signs of an enormous Martian ice deposit in 2016.
Scott Hubbard, a professor of astronautics at Stanford University who served as NASA’s first Mars program director in 2000, called it “tremendously exciting.”
“Our mantra back then was ‘follow the water.’ That was the one phrase that captured everything,” Hubbard said. “So this discovery, if it stands, is just thrilling because it’s the culmination of that philosophy.”
The study, published in the journal Science, does not determine how deep the reservoir actually is. This means that scientists can’t specify whether it’s an underground pool, an aquifer-like body, or just a layer of sludge. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Remember that giant, planet-wide dust storm that sprung up on Mars in late May? Yeah, well, it’s still going on. Initially thought to be a pretty minor dust-up in one isolated region of the planet, the storm has since engulfed the entirety of Mars, and NASA now has a stunning side-by-side movie that demonstrates just how much the storm has changed the planet.
High-speed winds have kicked up so much dust into the atmosphere that Mars no longer looks like a marbled ball of rock with colored bands, but rather a cloudy sphere with near uniform coloring all around. It’s really, really wild.
I mean just look at that thing. NASA knows that these kinds of planet-spanning storms do happen on occasion — typically every six to eight Earth years — but still have very little clue as to how they are caused. Things like this just don’t happen here on Earth, so it’s taking the scientific community a while to really wrap their heads around it. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]The search for evidence of past life on Mars is a long, complicated endeavor that NASA has devoted an incredible amount of time and money to. That investment may pay off one day soon, but in the meantime we’ll have to settle for all the cool non-living sights Mars has to offer, like these “spiders” captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
They’re still creepy and crawly, the spiders NASA is talking about here aren’t living arachnids; they’re bizarre geographical formations that are the result of frozen carbon dioxide that rests below the Martian soil
“Called ‘araneiform terrain,’ describes the spider-like radiating mounds that form when carbon dioxide ice below the surface heats up and releases,” NASA explains in a post. “This is an active seasonal process not seen on Earth. Like dry ice on Earth, the carbon dioxide ice on Mars sublimates as it warms (changes from solid to gas) and the gas becomes trapped below the surface.”
Over time the trapped carbon dioxide gas builds in pressure and is eventually strong enough to break through the ice as a jet that erupts dust. The gas is released into the atmosphere and darker dust may be deposited around the vent or transported by winds to produce streaks. The loss of the sublimated carbon dioxide leaves behind these spider-like features etched into the surface. – READ MORE
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