Mars Had Liquid Water in Recent Past, Rover Finds

[n2doc]

Ker Than
for National Geographic News
December 3, 2009
Even while snared in a sand trap, NASA's Mars rover Spirit has hit "wet" pay dirt: evidence of relatively recent groundwater activity on the red planet.

For almost six months the rover has been precariously perched on the edge of a shallow crater in an equatorial region of Mars. The area is filled with cooled lava flows pitted by meteorite impacts.

While on a routine drive, Spirit broke through a thin crust of hard soil that capped a filled-in impact crater, and its wheels became half buried in the soft sand.

Since early November the rover team has been remotely spinning Spirit's wheels to try and maneuver the rover out of its trap.

During one of these rescue attempts, Spirit churned up the soil and uncovered an intriguing layer of bright, fluffy soil. Mission managers had the rover take a closer look, and they discovered that the layer is in sulfates, minerals known to form on Earth only in the presence of liquid water.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091203-mars-water-rover-spirit-snow.html

[POAS]

1. Well, recent in geologic time scale

not human ones, but interesting none-the-less!

Thanks!

[aquart]

2. Shh. Velikovsky. Shhhh.

[Motown_Johnny]

3. It should be obvious that all the objects in the solar system had water

in one form or another at some point.

The theory is that Earth's water was brought to us by comets and asteroids smashing into the planet for millions of years.

There is no reason to think that these objects did not hit every other planet and moon in the system.


What happened to the water after impact is another story, but finding water ice in craters on the Moon or on Mars should not be surprising.

[pokerfan]

4. Not entirely

Extraterrestrial sources

That the Earth's water originated purely from comets is implausible, as a result of measurements of the isotope ratios of hydrogen in the three comets Halley, Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp by researchers like David Jewitt, as according to this research the ratio of deuterium to protium (D/H ratio) of the comets is approximately double that of oceanic water. What is however unclear is whether these comets are representative of those from the Kuiper Belt. According to A. Morbidelli <8> the largest part of today's water comes from protoplanets formed in the outer asteroid belt that plunged toward the Earth, as indicated by the D/H proportions in carbon-rich chondrites. The water in carbon-rich chondrites point to a similar D/H ratio as oceanic water. Nevertheless, mechanisms have been proposed<9> to suggest that the D/H-ratio of ocean water may have increased significantly throughout Earth's history. Such a proposal is consistent with the possibility that a significant amount of the water on Earth was already present during the planet's early evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_water_on_Earth#Extraterrestrial_sources