While Mars is best known as a dusty planet of red sand dunes and no life, scientists said today that they now believe that there is evidence of liquid water on Mars today. This means that there is a possibility that life can exist there, or that it has in the past.
The findings will be published in the journal Nature Geoscience by University of Arizona professor Alfred S. McEwen, reports The New York Times. McEwen and other scientists also announced their findings at a press conference at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. NASA teased the news conference over the weekend.
While scientists have known that Mars has water trapped in its polar ice caps, it wasn’t clear if streaks descending canyons really were created by water. As temperatures cooled, the streaks disappeared, but would then reappear during the Martian summer. In 2011, McEwen and others theorized that water helped create the streaks. Georgia Institute of Technology graduate student Lujendra Ojha also contributed to that study and attended the NASA conference today.
The team identified the waterlogged molecules creating the streaks as salts called perchlorates. These salts lower the freezing temperature, keeping the water liquid.
“That’s a direct detection of water in the form of hydration of salts,” McEwen explained to the Times. “There pretty much has to have been liquid water recently present to produce the hydrated salt.”
Scientists still aren’t sure where this water is coming from. The Associated Press reports that they need further exploration to find if microscopic life could be on Mars.
The data for today’s announcement came from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the red planet since 2006.