The trouble with science is that nature is honest. It doesn’t always give you the answers you want. The US space administration NASA has confessed that its priority for future planetary missions to Mars is to look for life. Yet every attempt to find evidence for Martians so far has failed, and it is starting to look as though there might not be any needles in the haystack anyway. Even the report in 1996 of possible ‘fossils’ of Martian bacteria in a meteorite thrown to Earth from the Red Planet now has a tattered reputation. But still Mars teases, exposing glimpses of a wetter past and even perhaps a sporadically watery present.
August 18th, 2000
Ions in the cross-fire Nature
Mars today is arid. Its thin atmosphere and cold surface are no place for water. Yet many of the planet’s surface features, vast plains and deep ravines, hint that water was once abundant. Now a chunk of rock that fell to Earth near the Egyptian village of El-Nakhla on 28 June 1911 provides the newest clue that water was once common on the Martian surface.