NASA Finds Flowing Water on Mountains Mars!

video of the dark streaks where water was found on Mars.

Holy Schnoogles!!  NASA just announced this morning that they have found solid evidence of liquid water flowing on the planet Mars.

“It took multiple spacecraft over several years to solve this mystery, and now we know there is liquid water on the surface of this cold, desert planet.” – Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington.

The discovery of liquid water on Mars raises the possibility of life on Mars exponentially.  There just may be life up in those thar hills!

The next step:  get the Mars Reconnaissance Rover over to those Martian streams to dip its cup in there and see what it can find in that flowing Martian water. 

If there happens to be microbes living in that water….  BOOM!!!!  NASA will have found the first ever alien lifeforms!  The only problem is that the Mars Rover is no good in the mountains…

The chances of their being life in that flowing water…  Who knows…  Likely pretty low since the average surface temperature on Mars is -65ºF.  But you never know.  There are microbes here on earth that can live in temperatures as low as -20ºC.  Microbes on Mars may have been alive during an era on Mars with warmer temperatures then slowly evolved to tolerate colder and colder temperatures as the climate on Mars cooled.

HOW NASA FOUND WATER ON MARS:

Well, it’s really complicated how they figured this out.  Basically, they have confirmed that there is flowing water on Mars via multiple years of studying dark streaks forming along mountain sides on Mars during the Martian summer.  The dark streaks were always suspected to be water flowing down the mountainsides during the warmest time of the year on Mars.

The breakthrough they were waiting for to positively confirm that these dark streaks are caused by flowing water came via finding special molecules that are always associated with water called perchlorates in the soil where the dark streaks form.

In a paper published in the journal “Nature Geoscience” NASA researchers

“identified waterlogged molecules — salts of a type known as perchlorates — in readings from orbit.”

“There pretty much has to have been liquid water recently present to produce the hydrated salt [perchlorate].” Dr. Alfred McEwen

Got it?  Good.

Now that we know there is flowing water on Mars, there is a much better chance of potentially finding life on Mars!  Aliens…  in our solar system…  can you even image that?  Unreal.

NASA PRESS RELEASE TODAY:

New findings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.

Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. These darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. They darken and appear to flow down steep slopes during warm seasons, and then fade in cooler seasons. They appear in several locations on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius), and disappear at colder times.

“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now 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. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars.”

These downhill flows, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), often have been described as possibly related to liquid water. The new findings of hydrated salts on the slopes point to what that relationship may be to these dark features. The hydrated salts would lower the freezing point of a liquid brine, just as salt on roads here on Earth causes ice and snow to melt more rapidly. Scientists say it’s likely a shallow subsurface flow, with enough water wicking to the surface to explain the darkening.

“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.

Ojha first noticed these puzzling features as a University of Arizona undergraduate student in 2010, using images from the MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). HiRISE observations now have documented RSL at dozens of sites on Mars. The new study pairs HiRISE observations with mineral mapping by MRO’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM).

The spectrometer observations show signatures of hydrated salts at multiple RSL locations, but only when the dark features were relatively wide. When the researchers looked at the same locations and RSL weren’t as extensive, they detected no hydrated salt.

Ojha and his co-authors interpret the spectral signatures as caused by hydrated minerals called perchlorates. The hydrated salts most consistent with the chemical signatures are likely a mixture of magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate. Some perchlorates have been shown to keep liquids from freezing even when conditions are as cold as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 70 Celsius). On Earth, naturally produced perchlorates are concentrated in deserts, and some types of perchlorates can be used as rocket propellant.

Perchlorates have previously been seen on Mars. NASA’s Phoenix lander and Curiosity rover both found them in the planet’s soil, and some scientists believe that the Viking missions in the 1970s measured signatures of these salts. However, this study of RSL detected perchlorates, now in hydrated form, in different areas than those explored by the landers. This also is the first time perchlorates have been identified from orbit.

MRO has been examining Mars since 2006 with its six science instruments.

“The ability of MRO to observe for multiple Mars years with a payload able to see the fine detail of these features has enabled findings such as these: first identifying the puzzling seasonal streaks and now making a big step towards explaining what they are,” said Rich Zurek, MRO project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

For Ojha, the new findings are more proof that the mysterious lines he first saw darkening Martian slopes five years ago are, indeed, present-day water.

“When most people talk about water on Mars, they’re usually talking about ancient water or frozen water,” he said. “Now we know there’s more to the story. This is the first spectral detection that unambiguously supports our liquid water-formation hypotheses for RSL.”

The discovery is the latest of many breakthroughs by NASA’s Mars missions.

“It took multiple spacecraft over several years to solve this mystery, and now we know there is liquid water on the surface of this cold, desert planet,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “It seems that the more we study Mars, the more we learn how life could be supported and where there are resources to support life in the future.”