HONG KONG: There is growing speculation that NASA may be about to announce it has discovered liquid water on Mars after the space agency called a press conference for Monday titled ‘Mars mystery solved’.
At the centre of the rumours is Lujendra Ojha, a grad student at Georgia Tech, who has been announced as one of the speakers alongside two of NASA’s most senior scientists. Ojha is credited with ‘accidentally’ discovering the first major evidence that moving water existed on Mars after studying images of the planet’s surface back in 2011 while at the University of Arizona.
Alongside Alfred McEwen, who is also tabled to speak at the NASA press conference, Ojha decided to study images of gullies on Mars’s surface taken by a fellow researcher, Colin Dundas.
For his study, Ojha edited the images to remove blemishes such as shadows and light interference, only to discover dark finger-like markings that moved through the gullies over time.
Not only did the markings appear to move, they did so in a pattern that would be consistent with flowing water.
Ojha branded the discovery a ‘lucky accident’, saying he had no idea what the shapes were at first, and adding that they had not even occurred in the gullies he had been planning to study.
None the less, once the potential significance of the shapes was realised, he committed to ‘years of research’ in trying to prove that the markings were actually created by flowing water. Ojha then moved on the Georgia Tech where he continued to study the gullies.
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