There used to be more water than anyone realized on Mars, data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter seems to show.
Mars’ southern highlands have considerable amounts of phyllosilicates, a type of hydrated minerals formed by extensive water exposure. However, no one knew if there were similar minerals on the northern third of the planet, because it is covered by lava plains up to a mile deep three billion years ago.
Researchers have wondered if below that layer of lava there might be hydrated minerals, indicated that eons ago liquid water flowed over the surface there as well.
June 29th, 2010
Mars once had more water than we knew
June 19th, 2010
Seventh Graders Find a Cave on Mars
California middle school students using the camera on NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter have found lava tubes with one pit that appears to be a skylight to a cave.
The students in science teacher Dennis Mitchell’s class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., were examining Martian lava tubes as their project in the Mars Student Imaging Program offered by NASA and Arizona State University. Students in this program develop a geological question, then target a Mars-orbiting camera to take an image that helps answer the question.
Mars Odyssey has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2001, returning data and images of the Martian surface and providing relay communications service for the twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.
June 9th, 2010
Geological map points to ancient seas on Mars Astronomy Now
A geological map, created using data from a plethora of orbiting spacecraft, presents new evidence that lakes persisted early in Mars’ history.
The map focuses on Hellas Planitia, an area located in the planet’s southern hemisphere that is well known for its giant impact basin – the Hellas basin – which spans over 2,000 kilometres in diameter and plunges to a depth of eight kilometres.
June 9th, 2010
Extreme Life on Earth Could Survive on Mars, Too
A new discovery of bacterial life in a Martian-like environment on Earth suggests our neighboring red planet could also be hospitable to some form of microbial life.
Researchers found methane-eating bacteria that appear to be thriving in a unique spring called Lost Hammer on Axel Heiberg Island in the extreme north of Canada.
This spring is similar to possible past or present springs on Mars, the scientists say, so it hints that microbial life could potentially exist there, too. There is no firm evidence that Mars does or ever did host life, however.
May 28th, 2010
Planetary Scientists Solve 40-Year-Old Mysteries of Mars’ Northern Ice Cap UANews
A team of planetary scientists has used radar and a high-resolution camera to reveal the subsurface geology of Mars’ northern ice cap.
The findings – based on data from SHARAD (the surface-penatrating radar) and HiRISE (the high-resolution camera) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – were published May 27 in two papers in the journal Nature.
The group studying a canyon feature called Chasma Boreale included Shane Byrne from University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Jack Holt and Isaac Smith of The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics are the papers’ lead authors.
“The ice sheet on Mars’ northern polar region is about the size and thickness of the Greenland ice sheet,” said Byrne. “Just like Greenland, the layers of ice on Mars preserve a climate record that reaches back probably a few million years. Studying this ice sheet and its internal layers tells us about Martian climate and how it has varied in the past.”
May 6th, 2010
Are Martian gullies formed by water or not? Discover
The idea of liquid water on Mars is an enticing one. We know life on Earth needs liquid water, and if we find it on Mars… We know there’s plenty of frozen water on Mars; we see it there in abundance. But Mars is cold, and the air is thin, making liquid water on the surface difficult to achieve, let alone sustain.
But there’s been tantalizing evidence. Ever since Mars Global Surveyor got to the Red Planet in 1997, we’ve seen gullies sprinkled here and there. These gullies form on slopes near the tops of the hills, and are clearly the result of something moving downslope and digging furrows. But is that something water, or just sand and dust? The conclusions flip-flop back and forth; I’ve seen papers come out saying water-not-sand and others saying sand-not-water several times.
April 21st, 2010
Mars’ Olympus Mons 3 x Height of Mount Everest-The Solar System’s Most Massive Volcano The Daily Galaxy
Mars, as the images issued by the Phoenix probe show us, is not like the Earth: “It is continuous, seamless and sealess,” writes Oliver Morton -Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World. But rising above the Red Planets frequent dust storms is the Olympus Mons -the tallest known volcano and mountain in our solar system. The central edifice of this shield volcano stands 27 kilometers ( 88,580 ft) high above the surface -or three times the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level and 2.6 times the height of Mauna Kea above its base. It is 550 km in width, flanked by steep cliffs, and has a caldera complex that is 85 km long, 60 km wide, and up to 3 km deep with six overlapping pit craters. Its outer edge is defined by an escarpment up to 6 km tall; unique among the shield volcanoes of the Red Planet.
March 23rd, 2010
A Burst of Spring
Spring has sprung on Mars, bring with it the disappearance of carbon dioxide ice (dry ice) that covers the north polar sand dunes. In spring, the sublimation of the ice (going directly from ice to gas) causes a host of uniquely Martian phenomena.
In this image streaks of dark basaltic sand have been carried from below the ice layer to form fan-shaped deposits on top of the seasonal ice. The similarity in the directions of the fans suggests that they formed at the same time, when the wind direction and speed was the same. They often form along the boundary between the dune and the surface below.
March 17th, 2010
Bad News for Terraformers: Periodic Bursts Of Solar Radiation Destroy The Martian Atmosphere Popular Science
Unfortunately for anyone looking to terraform Mars, a new study shows that powerful waves of solar wind periodically strip the Red Planet of its atmosphere. Scientists had known for years that Mars has atmosphere troubles, but only by analyzing new data from he Mars Express spacecraft were they able to identify the special double solar waves as the specific cause.
Double solar waves are a rare phenomenon that result when the Sun emits waves of differing speeds. If a fast wave follows a slow wave, the fast wave crashes into the back of the slow one, rolling them both up into a super-charged double wave. Scientists were able to correlate Martian atmosphere loss, as measured by the the Mars Express spacecraft, with records of double radiation waves in 2007 and 2008 taken by the Advanced Composition Explorer spacecraft. According to the study, one third of Martian atmosphere loss occurs during these waves, which are only present 15 percent of the time.
March 17th, 2010
Martian Weather Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) is a NASA mission that arrived at Mars in September, 1997, and for nine years circled the planet every two hours in a polar orbit (that is, traveling from the north pole to the south pole and back) at an altitude of 400 kilometers (249 miles) above the Martian surface. MGS went silent in November, 2006. It carried a suite of five instruments designed to study the entire Martian surface, atmosphere, and interior, and their datasets have provided astronomers with a wealth of information about the climate and atmosphere of Mars. The results are not only interesting to students of Mars. As astronomers discover new extrasolar planets, and as Earth-based meteorologists test the realism of their atmospheric models, the results of meteorological analyses of another planet besides Earth provide an important reference.