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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 4, 2015

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REAL LIFE NEWS: THE RIVERS OF MARS

by Hazed

It’s official: there is water on Mars, and that means the conditions are right for the possibility of microbial life.

In a press conference on Monday, NASA confirmed that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had provided the strongest evidence yet seen that liquid water flows intermittently on the planet.

That doesn’t mean we have actually seen water flowing, but we’ve seen evidence that it does flow. The evidence was gleaned from an imaging spectrometer, which looked at some mysterious streaks on deep slopes on the planet, which seem to ebb and flow over time, darkening during warm seasons and fading in cool seasons.

The signature of hydrated minerals was detected in the streaks. These would lower the freezing point of a liquid brine, just as salt put on the roads on Earth causes ice and snow to melt more rapidly.

So the implication is that the dark streaks are made by flowing water during the warm season. The third source link below shows a picture of the streaks.

“We found the hydrated salts only when the seasonal features were widest, which suggests that either the dark streaks themselves or a process that forms them is the source of the hydration. In either case, the detection of hydrated salts on these slopes means that water plays a vital role in the formation of these streaks,” said Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, lead author of a report on these findings published Sept. 28 by Nature Geoscience.

This is tremendously exciting. It could make life easier for future astronauts who travel to Mars, because the existence of water near the surface could decrease the cost of a mission.

It could also affect decisions about where to send future rovers and landers. While it sounds like a good idea to send a robot to examine the possible water, any craft would need to be thoroughly sterilised beforehand, to avoid any contamination that could confuse the search for actual alien life.

Who knows, maybe in my lifetime we will get the answer to David Bowie’s question: Is there life on Mars?*

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v--IqqusnNQ

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-evidence-that-liquid-water-flows-on-today-s-mars
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34379284
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150930.html

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