The presence of water on Mars is often talked about in the past tense — as in, billions of years in the past. But researchers have found clues that water could be flowing in the present, at least during warm seasons.
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology are looking at dark features on Martian slopes that are finger-shaped. They appear and disappear seasonally.
These flows represent the best suggestion we know of that Mars has water right now, scientists say. The study is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
In 2011, Lujendra Ojha and his colleagues announced the evidence for possible saltwater flows on Mars. They published a study in the journal Science based on data from the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.