Could There Be Life In Them Thar Pits? Want to stay on top of all the space news?
Follow @universetoday on Twitter Computer-generated perspective of the Tractus Catena pit chains. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Is This Proof of Life on Mars? Want to stay on top of all the space news?
Follow @universetoday on Twitter View of Mars from Viking 2 lander, September 1976. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) The Curiosity rover is currently on its way to Mars, scheduled to make a dramatic landing within Gale Crater in mid-August and begin its hunt for the geologic signatures of a watery, life-friendly past. Ice Sculptures Fill The Deepest Parts of Mars. Want to stay on top of all the space news?
Follow @universetoday on Twitter Curious "lava lamp" landforms in Mars' Hellas Basin may have been created by ice. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona One of the “weirdest and least understood” areas of Mars, the enormous Hellas Impact Basin contains strange flowing landforms that bespeak of some specialized and large-scale geologic process having taken place. The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently captured the image above, showing what’s being called “lava lamp terrain” — stretched and contorted surface that looks like overworked modeling clay or pulled taffy… or, with a bit of imagination, the melted, mesmerizing contents of a party light from another era.
Mysteriously dark Mars regions are made of glass - space - 15 April 2012. THEY look dark, but mysterious expanses on Mars are mainly made of glass forged in past volcanoes.
The dark regions make up more than 10 million square kilometres of the Martian northern lowlands, but their composition wasn't clear. Past spectral measurements indicated that they are unlike dark regions found elsewhere on the Red Planet, which consist mainly of basalt. Briony Horgan and Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe analysed near-infrared spectra of the regions, gathered by the Mars Express orbiter. They found absorption bands characteristic of the iron in volcanic glass, a shiny substance similar to obsidian that forms when magma cools too fast for its minerals to crystallise (Geology, DOI: 10.1130/G32755.1). The glass likely takes the form of sand-sized grains, as it does in glass-rich fields in Iceland. Mars' History Is A Fluid Situation. Four billion years ago, the Martian surface may have been cold and dry — not warm, watery and more Earthlike than it is today, as many scientists have suggested.
WHERE'S WATER? In an escarpment (left images) and crater (right images) on Mars, clays rich in iron and magnesium (shown in blue in bottom false-color images) have chemical compositions suggesting that most of the water on early Mars lay underground. Did Ancient Mars Have a Runaway Greenhouse? Cosmic impacts that once bombed Mars might have sent temperatures skyrocketing upward on the Red Planet in ancient times, enough to set warming of the surface on a runaway course, researchers say.
According to scientists, these findings could potentially help explain how this cold, dry world might have once sustained liquid water, conditions potentially friendly for life. The largest craters still visible on Mars were created about 3.7 billion to 4.1 billion years ago. More Evidence of Mars’ Watery Past. Want to stay on top of all the space news?
Follow @universetoday on Twitter The transition between Acidalia Planitia and Tempe Terra from the Mars Express High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). Credit ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) Did Water or Lava Carve the Outflow Channels on Mars? Want to stay on top of all the space news?
Follow @universetoday on Twitter Outflow channel in the Tharsis region on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Large features on Mars called outflow channels have been a point of contention among planetary scientists. Dreams of water on Mars evaporate. NASA/JPL-Caltech Sea change: previous ideas that lowlands on Mars (blue) once hosted oceans are being overturned. The debate began when nineteenth-century Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli thought he saw water-filled canali, or channels, on the red planet: just how wet was Mars?
“This is a pendulum that has been swinging back and forth,” says Jeff Andrews-Hanna, a planetary scientist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. The canali were an illusion, and no one doubts that Mars today is dry except for possible meagre seeps of groundwater. Salty Soil on Mars Could Be Slurping Water from the Atmosphere. Want to stay on top of all the space news?
Follow @universetoday on Twitter This image provided by NASA shows a scraped area on Mars known as "Snow White," photographed on July 8, 2008. Two samples from Snow White were delivered to the Phoenix Mars Lander's wet-chemistry lab, and tests turned up evidence of perchlorate. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona It happens every summer in humid air: the salt in your salt shaker clumps together as the salt draws in the water from the air.
Martian Water Stuck In Minerals: Scientific American Podcast. Mars today is pretty dry.
But billions of years ago, water flowed across the Red Planet. It ran in rivers that carved deep valleys. And it may have even filled a Martian ocean inside what today look like the remains of ancient shorelines. So where’d all the water go? Scientists Discover That Mars is Full of Water. Evidence for Flowing Water on Mars Grows Stronger. THE WOODLANDS, Tex. —Today's Mars is a frigid desert, a place where water—the key to life as we know it—has gone into hiding. Whatever water may have once existed on Mars in rivers, lakes or even oceans is now frozen into ice caps, locked up in hydrated minerals or buried in debris-coated glaciers.
Dark streaks on Mars bolster case for liquid water - space - 04 August 2011. Mars's dust bowl image may need a makeover. Dark streaks seen forming in summer and fading in winter might be signs of water flowing just beneath the surface. The sudden appearance of streaks on sloping ground have been attributed to present-day liquid water before, although their origin is still debated. Light streaks have been seen appearing on steep slopes in images taken years apart by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. And seasonal dark streaks have emerged in the north polar region.