Posted on

More Evidence for Past Water on Mars

NASA’s Spirit rover has dug up plenty of evidence on slopes of “Columbia Hills” that water once covered the area. Spirit has been inspecting an outcrop called “Clovis” on a hill about 9 metres (30 feet) above the Gusev Crater plains, and it’s found that liquid water changed the composition of the rock. Unlike rocks in the plains, which have coatings and veins created by small amounts of water, these formations have been deeply affected by water over a long period of time.

Posted on

A Single Robot Could Provide a Mission To Mars With Enough Water and Oxygen

Utilizing regolith on the Moon or Mars, especially to refill propellant for rockets to get back off the surface, is a common theme in the more engineering-minded space exploration community. There have been plenty of proof-of-concept technologies that could move us toward that goal. One of the best supported was the Regolith Advanced Surface Systems …

Continue reading “A Single Robot Could Provide a Mission To Mars With Enough Water and Oxygen”

Posted on

Marsquakes Can Help Us Find Water on the Red Planet

Earth is a seismically active planet, and scientists have figured out how to use seismic waves from Earthquakes to probe its interior. We even use artificially created seismic waves to identify underground petroleum-bearing formations. When the InSIGHT (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander was sent to Mars, it sensed Marsquakes to …

Continue reading “Marsquakes Can Help Us Find Water on the Red Planet”

Posted on

Mars’ Gale Crater was Filled with Water for Much Longer Than Anyone Thought

Even with all we’ve learned about Mars in recent years, it doesn’t stack up against all we still don’t know and all we hope to find out. We know that Mars was once warm and wet, a conclusion that was less certain a couple of decades ago. Now, scientists are working on uncovering the details …

Continue reading “Mars’ Gale Crater was Filled with Water for Much Longer Than Anyone Thought”

Posted on

Melting Water in Mars’ Past Could Have Created Martian Gullies

A recent study published in Science examines how thin channels inside impact craters on Mars could have formed from Martian gullies, which share similar characteristics with gullies on Earth and are typically formed from cascading meltwater, despite the Martian atmosphere being incapable of supporting liquid water on its surface. However, the researchers hypothesize these gullies …

Continue reading “Melting Water in Mars’ Past Could Have Created Martian Gullies”

Posted on

Mars Has Bizarre “Swiss Cheese” Terrain. You can Thank Water, Carbon Dioxide and 500,000 years of Climate History for That

Seen from space, regions of Mars around the south pole have a bizarre, pitted “Swiss cheese” appearance. These formations come from alternating massive deposits of CO2 ice and water ice, similar to different layers of a cake. For decades, planetary scientists wondered how this formation was possible, as it was long believed that this layering …

Continue reading “Mars Has Bizarre “Swiss Cheese” Terrain. You can Thank Water, Carbon Dioxide and 500,000 years of Climate History for That”