NASA Finds Evidence of Recent Flowing Water on Mars

SonicSpike writes to mention that Scientists are claiming that they have evidence of water flowing on Mars within the last five years. From the article: "Subsurface aquifers or melting ground ice were floated as possible sources of the water. One of the springs even appears at a fault line, according to Malin, just as they often do on Earth. The shortness of the gulleys, which seem to flow for but a few hundred yards, might be accounted for by a process similar to a volcano's eruption on Earth, with water instead of magma building up underground, and ice, instead of fire, characterizing the resulting flow."

INNACURATE! This is Hype!

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep your pants on:

"Nothing in the images, no matter how cool they are, proves that the flows were wet, or that they were anything more exciting than avalanches of sand and dust," Allan Treiman, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston said in an e-mail.

nuff said.

Get your ass to Mars

coast 2 coast

[deft]

Richard Hoagland (sp?) was talking about this last night on coast 2 coast... the radio show normally infested with funny alien abductees and anal probe recipients.

He apparently had seen this stuff in mars rover pictures and predicted it.... guess nasa has finally came to the same conclusion.

I bet they were just more thorough or cautious in their analysis before declaring anything.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not 100%

[silentounce]

Not all scientists are convinced that it was actually water.
 
"Many scientists believe the gullies were carved by liquid water, although others have argued they are due to avalanches of carbon dioxide gas or rivers of dust," from The New Scientist [newscientist.com].
 
  Also, here [nasa.gov] is the NASA release from their site.

Not quite on the surface

[LiquidCoooled]

If you look at the high res images (from NASA here [nasa.gov])
You can see the flow emerges from the side of an impact crater.
The water was most likely locked underground (as expected by the briney moist soil effect the rovers noticed just under the surface)

Its like diggign a hole in the sand at the beach, eventually water will start to seep in.

I am OP

[SonicSpike]

I am the original poster and the summary or even the link is NOTHING like I submitted. I guess the /. editors take 'editorial liberty' to the extreme! No resemblence to the orignal at all.

Oh well, at least I got credit for it and good karma ;-)

Lots More Pictures

[Alien54]

This has also been picked up [dailymail.co.uk] by the major media [msn.com].

On a side note [slashdot.org], the HiRISE team [uanews.org] is now posting new large images [arizona.edu] on the HiRISE Website [arizona.edu] every week on Wednesday. (A file size and format warning is needed. The full super high resolution photo of the Opportunity landing site [arizona.edu] is 677 MBytes in JP2 format)

Of course, there are some pics that I wouldn't mind a little more investigation on. I happen to be interested in something I call Gulliver's Golf Ball [usgs.gov], something that looks like a perfect sphere, roughly 200 meters across.

Re:Dunno what to think...

[sandrift]

Don't kid yourself - NASA PAO isn't nearly well-enough organized to strategize about when to release stuff like this. The paper is being published this week, so that's what dictates the announcement schedule. And believe me, you never know exactly when your paper will get published, so trying to time such disparate announcements to coincide would be very difficult anyway.

Re:Hmmm, how to get a closer look?

[trentblase]

When you google [google.com] something, you run an internet search.

When you squirt [squirt.org] something, you're trying to find a gay hookup.

Think about it.

Still a data transfer

[CustomDesigned]

So? "Squirt" in the lewd sense is *still* a rapid data transfer. Works better for the intended purpose, however, when one end is a responder - rather than both ends being initiators.

Re:INNACURATE! This is Hype!

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Alternatives are *possible*. However, the trick is, the deposits do look different from other, known deposits produced by dust avalanches elsewhere on Mars, and, furthermore, the erosive channel systems above the deposits look consistent with a water interpretation and seepage from underground, rather than a "dry debris flow" interpretation (e.g., the channels converge at the top in tributary systems and meander towards the bottom on lower slopes, which is more characteristic of fluids than dry flows).

Here's the NASA press release [nasa.gov] with some pictures. There are many more pictures at the Malin Space Science Systems [msss.com] web site (they're the ones that ran the MGS until it was lost a few weeks ago). Also at the same time as the "possible water" press release, they were releasing information on recent cratering -- i.e. craters formed within the last few years. The published article is supposed to be in the Dec. 8 issue of Science [sciencemag.org], but it isn't released yet and you'll probably need a subscription to read it when it is.

Re:coast 2 coast

[MtViewGuy]

The possibility of water on Mars was confirmed in 1971 when Mariner 9 discovered ancient river valleys at several places on the planet. Since then, the conjecture was always how long ago did Mars have liquid water on the surface of the planet.

Re:INNACURATE! This is Hype!

[Chelloveck]

"Nothing in the images, no matter how cool they are, proves that the flows were wet, or that they were anything more exciting than avalanches of sand and dust," Allan Treiman, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston said in an e-mail.

Well, yes, but according to the scientists at the press conference all disturbances of the martian soil so far have shown up as darker than the undisturbed soil, not lighter as these images show. Also, the shapes of the light spots are more consistent with those a relatively thick muddy liquid would make than with what you'd see in a landslide. They did allow that yes, these images could be showing some previously unseen dry phenomenon, but that the shapes and color are both indicative of liquid.

Re:Lots More Pictures

[pln2bz]

Of course, there are some pics that I wouldn't mind a little more investigation on. I happen to be interested in something I call Gulliver's Golf Ball, something that looks like a perfect sphere, roughly 200 meters across.

Like many other "mysteries" of Mars, domed craters are only mysteries because we assume that electricity is having a limited effect upon the terraforming of Mars. And yet, we can create domed craters with electricity in the laboratory ...

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/0503 29domedcraters.htm [thunderbolts.info]

If you don't mind, I'm going to redirect you to my other recent post on the electrical terraforming of Mars. There is much evidence to support the notion that NASA is ignoring the role that electricity plays on Mars ...

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=210316&cid=171 39302 [slashdot.org]