LONDON: Last week NASA sent out acryptic press release about solving a “major” mystery on Mars, which it announced Monday at 11:30 a.m. EDT. Beyond that the space agency provided little information.
So what is the “Mars mystery” NASA has solved? Flowing water on the red planet.
This is indeed a major discovery. Where there’s water, there may be life. But in this case I wouldn’t hold your breath.
NASA hyping this finding is a bit like throwing a party over a patch of wet sand in a desert when — right around the celestial corner — at least two vast, habitable oceans remain unexplored.
Water flows on Mars, raising possibility that planet could support life – scientists
The news we heard Monday dates back to 2011, when an undergraduate named Lujendra Ojha discovered dark streaks on the slope of a crater near the Martian equator.
Back then, Ojha, planetary scientist Alfred McEwen, and other researchers announced in the journal Science that these streaks, called “slope lineae,” appeared during warmer periods on Mars. (McEwen also led a 2013 followup study in the journal Nature.) They suggested that water ice in the soil is melting, leaking down the crater wall, and showing up in Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite images.
NASA told the world in August 2011 that “salt water may flow on Mars.”
The space agency’s big announcement on confirmed this alongside a Sept. 28 study authored by Ojha, McEwen, and others in Nature Geoscience.
Concluding there’s water on Mars is a great milestone for studying that planet, but scientists have strongly suspected this for about a decade. It’s not worth all of the space agency’s hype. NASA didn’t even get into the origins of the water, which is the newest and most interesting part of the story.
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