NASA Mars Liquid Water Announcement: Found; Timing With ‘The Martian’ Release

“Scientists announced with a high degree of certainty that we’re now sure there is water on mars, and if you look at where humans have gone before on this planet, we’ve always followed the water“.

Life forms probably could only survive below ground because the surface of Mars is so inhospitable, bombarded by ultraviolet rays from the sun that would destroy all life as we know it, say experts, who note that Mars’ thin atmosphere would offer little protection.

Mars is basically a pretty arid place, so it’s pretty astonishing that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was able to spot signs of liquid water on the planet’s surface. “I wasn’t making enough money so I said screw music, let’s go to science, maybe there’s more money in it. But there isn’t money in science either”. Is there life swimming in that water? Almost a decade ago, NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor took pictures of what appeared to be water bursting through a gully wall and flowing around boulders and other rocky debris. Instead of that rollover being the result of poor driving, Weir said he would have written it so that the rover gets trapped in the sudden flow of wet sand that we now know to be a seasonal occurrence on Mars.

The explanation was that the substance calcium perchlorate has been found in the soil which lowers the freezing point so the water does not freeze into ice, but is liquid and present in very salty water – brine.

The next task for scientists is to find the source of the briny liquid water and measure its volume. The ultimate goal would be to one day bring samples back to Earth for analysis.

One thing that scientists and researchers are still unsure of is where the waters seen in Mars are coming from.

“I thought there was no hope”, Lujendra Ojha, a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology and lead author of the scientific paper, told Reuters.

And what’s even cooler is the book is “required reading” at the NASA Johnson Space Center and the film has been screened twice at NASA and for the crew aboard the worldwide Space Station.

The CRISM (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars) instrument only detected water in the dark streaks of the planet so far. With an apparent solution in the works for solving the riddle of cultivating and maintaining Martian resources, it seems likely Grunsfeld’s wish to get there quickly won’t be hard to fulfill.