Giant Mars crater shows evidence of ancient lake

[The Straight Story]

New photos of a huge crater on Mars suggest water may lurk in crevices under the planet's surface, hinting that life might have once lived there, and raising the possibility that it may live there still, researchers say.

Future research looking into the chances of life on Mars could shed light on the origins of life on Earth, scientists added.

The discovery came from a study of images by NASA's powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that revealed new evidence of a wet underground environment on the Red Planet. The images focused on the giant McLaughlin Crater, which is about 57 miles (92 kilometers) wide and so deep that underground water appears to have flowed into the crater at some point in the distant past.

Today, the crater is bone-dry but harbors clay minerals and other evidence that liquid water filled the area in the ancient past.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50529920/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.UP00UPJIGSo

[Scootaloo]

1. If life on Earth is any indication (and there's no reason for it not to be)

Then the possibility of life on Mars is guaranteed, if life ever began there. While individual organisms and even entire classifications can be quite vulnerable to death and extinction, "life" itself is amazingly hard to get rid of. Life persists, recovers, and re-radiates.

Basically, barring some grotesquely amazing cataclysm striking Mars (Not outside the realm of possibility, it DOES have a volcano that extends past its atmosphere for heaven's sake) then either life never arose on Mars, or life still exists on Mars.

The lack of multicellular life points me towards the idea of a sterile planet, honestly; but hen we've only very lightly scratched around a couple blocks of a world with several times more land area than our own, so who knows?

[Cirque du So-What]

2. Still, we gotta find water

All of life's processes occur in an aqueous solution or a colloidal suspension, requiring the solvent properties of water. Even in the driest desert on earth, the cells or every organism contain a saline solution that is a remnant of the primordial ocean. Find water on Mars, and that's where the greatest likelihood of finding life will occur.

[Scootaloo]

3. We really should aim for the poles

I'm sure there's technical difficulties in doing so, but smacking into what's effectively the Martian tropics belt isn't helpful.