Images Suggest Water Once Covered Mars

by MsMcReality | July 16, 2008 at 11:00 pm | 406 views | 10 comments

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Minerals in the soil of Mars show it was covered once by lakes, rivers and other bodies of water that could have supported life, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

It is believed Mars was once covered by lakes, flowing rivers and other water-bodies. In June of this year, the Mars Pheonix Lander found ice frozen hard and covered by red dust!

"This is really exciting because we're finding dozens of sites where future missions can land to understand if Mars was ever habitable and if so, to look for signs of past life," said John Mustard of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who worked on the study.

An immense helper in this discovery have been the minerals native to the planet. Different minerals suggest different forms of water. The only way for minerals to be there, naturally, is water.

Apart from the ice, alkaline soil was also discovered, something unexpected by researchers.

The clay-like minerals, called phyllosilicates, suggest water interacted with rocks dating back to what is called the Noachian period on Mars, about 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago.

Another study from Nature Geoscience found evidence of river channels forming a delta where the rivers emptied into a crater lake. The believe is that evidence will be found in the clay since clay does such a wonderful job at preserving life.

On July 11th, the press was informed that the last soil sample could be the last one due to a short circuit on one of their instruments. The Pheonix Mars Lander suffered an electrical glitch costing scientst $420 MILLION! Although this may be true, the Pheonix Lander did survive the 10-month jouney in May. It managed to find ice and Earth like soil. Scientists' objectives were to understand how the soil chemisty changed with depth. Since the Pheonix short-circuited, sceintsts decided to jump ahead to digging the ice. This wasn't exactly the brightest idea. Scientsits tried to scoop ice with the arm of the Pheonix but had no luck. Although this may be true, the next test could happen as early as next week.