Martian Water Archives

February 6, 2021February 6, 2021 by Andy Tomaswick

What’s Causing Those Landslides on Mars? Maybe Underground Salt and Melting Ice

Changes in Mar’s geography always attract significant scientific and even public attention. A hope for signs of liquid water (and therefore life) is likely one of the primary driving forces behind this interest. One particularly striking changing feature is the Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL) originally found by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Now, scientists at the SETI Institute have a modified theory for where those RSLs might develop – a combination of water ice and salt just under the Martian surface.

December 5, 2020December 5, 2020 by Matt Williams

Astronauts Will be Able to Extract Fuel, Air, and Water From Martian Brine

This illustration shows Jezero Crater — the landing site of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover — as it may have looked billions of years go on Mars, when it was a lake. An inlet and outlet are also visible on either side of the lake. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A little over a decade from now, NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars for the first time. This mission will build on decades of robotic exploration, collect samples from the surface, and return them to Earth for analysis. Given the immense distance involved, any operations on the Martian surface will need to be as self-sufficient as possible, which means sourcing whatever they can locally.

This includes using the local water to create oxygen gas, drinking water, and rocket fuel, which represents a challenge considering that any liquid water is likely to be briny. Luckily, a team of researchers from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University at St. Louis (WUSTL) has created a new type of electrolysis system that can convert briny water into usable products while also being compact and lightweight.

November 23, 2020November 23, 2020 by Evan Gough

Mars Might Have Lost its Water Quickly

This artist's concept depicts the early Martian environment (right) – believed to contain liquid water and a thicker atmosphere – versus the cold, dry environment seen at Mars today (left). Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Mars is an arid place, and aside from a tiny amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, all water exists as ice. But it wasn’t always this arid. Evidence of the planet’s past wet chapter dots the surface. Paleolakes like Jezero Crater, soon to be explored by NASA’s Perseverance Rover, provide stark evidence of Mars’ ancient past. But what happened to all that water?

It disappeared into space, of course. But when? And how quickly?

August 6, 2020August 6, 2020 by Evan Gough

Martian Features Were Carved by Glaciers, not Flowing Rivers

Orbiters are giving us a chance to study the surface of Mars closely, and some of the features that pop to prominence are dry river channels. There are over 10,000 of them. But a new study suggests that glaciers on ancient Mars are responsible for many of them.

According to the study, those glaciers and the water flowing under them are resonsible for carving out some of those riverbeds, rather than free-flowing rivers.

May 29, 2020May 29, 2020 by Evan Gough

Mars Doesn’t Have Much of a Magnetosphere, But Here’s a Map

This image is from a scientific visualization of the electric currents around Mars. Electric currents (blue and red arrows) envelop Mars in a nested, double-loop structure that wraps continuously around the planet from its day side to its night side. These current loops distort the solar wind magnetic field (not pictured), which drapes around Mars to create an induced magnetosphere around the planet. In the process, the currents electrically connect Mars’ upper atmosphere and the induced magnetosphere to the solar wind, transferring electric and magnetic energy generated at the boundary of the induced magnetosphere (faint inner paraboloid) and at the solar wind bow shock (faint outer paraboloid). Credits: NASA/Goddard/MAVEN/CU Boulder/SVS/Cindy Starr

Even though Earthling scientists are studying Mars intently, it’s still a mysterious place.

One of the striking things about Mars is all of the evidence, clearly visible on its surface, that it harbored liquid water. Now, all that water is gone, and in fact, liquid water couldn’t survive on the surface of the Red Planet. Not as the planet is now, anyway.

But it could harbour water in the past. What happened?

May 3, 2019May 3, 2019 by Evan Gough

The Global Dust Storm that Ended Opportunity Helped Teach us how Mars Lost its Water

Mars in 2001. On the left, no global dust storm. On the right, global dust storm. Image Credit: By Jim Secosky picked out this NASA image NASA/JPL/MSSS - https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/figures/PIA03170_fig1.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65809875

The enduring, and maybe endearing, mystery around Mars is what happened to its water? We can say with near-certainty now, thanks to the squad of Mars rovers and orbiters, that Mars was once much wetter. In fact that planet may have had an ocean that covered a third of the surface. But what happened to it all?

As it turns out, the global dust storms that envelop Mars, and in particular the most recent one that felled the Opportunity rover, may offer an explanation.

April 16, 2019April 16, 2019 by Evan Gough

Curiosity has Finally Sampled a Clay-Rich Region on Mars

A mast-cam mosaic image of the so-called "clay-bearing unit". After almost seven years on Mars, MSL Curiosity has finally been able to drill into the clay-rich region. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

It’s hard to believe that MSL Curiosity has been on Mars for almost seven years. But it has, and during that time, the rover has explored Gale Crater and Mt. Sharp, the central peak inside the crater. And while it has used its drill multiple times to take rock samples, this is the first sample it’s gathered from the so-called ‘clay unit.’

April 1, 2019April 1, 2019 by Evan Gough

Rivers on Mars Flowed for More Than a Billion Years

A photo of a preserved river channel on Mars. The color is overlaid to show elevation, with blue being low and yellow being high elevation. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Univ. Arizona/UChicago

The ancient climate of Mars is a mystery to scientists. Even with all we’ve learned about Mars, it’s still difficult to explain how lakes and rivers existed. A new study shows that Martian rivers were swollen with runoff and that they flowed far later into the planet’s history than previously thought.

The question is, how did the Martian climate create these conditions?

February 22, 2019February 22, 2019 by Evan Gough

Signs that Ancient Rivers Flowed Across the Surface of Mars, Billions of Years Ago

A topographic image of an area of anceint riverbeds on Mars. Created with data from the High-Resolution Stereo Camera on the Mars Express Orbiter. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/ESA_Multimedia/Copyright_Notice_Images

Billions of years ago, Mars was likely a much warmer and wetter place than the cold, dry, barren world we see today. Whether there was life there or not remains an open question. But there’s a massive, growing wall of evidence showing that Mars may have had the necessary conditions for life in the past, including at least one system of river valley networks.

February 13, 2019February 13, 2019 by Evan Gough

There’s Evidence that Mars is Still Volcanically Active

A new study shows that Mars may very well be volcanically active. Nobody’s seen direct evidence of volcanism; no eruptions or magma or anything like that. Rather, the proof is in the water.