Space and astronomy news
Image credit: NASA Since it arrived at Mars in 1997, the Mars Global Surveyor has been searching the surface of the Red Planet for carbonate minerals. Large quantities of this substance would be evidence that the planet was once warm and wet, with large oceans and seas on the surface. Surveyor has found trace quantities …
Continue reading “Maybe There Wasn’t Water on Mars in the Past”
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”
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”
Before going into hibernation, China’s Zhurong rover found evidence that water recently existed in small patches on Mars (and might still!)
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 …
This week, NASA’s Curiosity rover stumbled across the best evidence yet that liquid water once covered much of Mars in the planet’s distant past: undulating rippled rock formations – now frozen in time – that were sculpted by the waves of an ancient shallow lake. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that they were discovered …
Continue reading “Curiosity Just Found its Strongest Evidence of Ancient Water and Waves on Mars”
One of the benefits of having a cluster of satellites orbiting another planet is that scientists can then analyze that planet’s weather. Sometimes in that process, they find patterns that are strikingly similar to those found on our home planet. That was the case recently when a group of scientists from ESA used data from …
Continue reading “Many Clouds on Mars are Driven by Dust, not Water”
New research has shown that Mars may have been covered in a worldwide ocean when Earth was still covered in molten lava.
New research from Cornell University shows that radar reading from Mars’ South Pole region may not have been caused by an underground lake.
On Earth, we all know what changes our landscapes: water and wind erosion, tectonic activity, and volcanism. Today on Mars, wind-driven erosion is hard at work. Wind is an inexorable sculptor everywhere. And, it might have created places where planetary scientists and astrobiologists hunt for traces of primordial Martian life today.