NASA Confirms Presence of Water On Mars Planet

“To me, the chances of there being life in the subsurfaces of Mars has always been very high”, said Alfred McEwen, HiRISE Principal Investigator.

NASA researchers wrote in the journal Science that they compared the ratio of two different types of water found in the Martian atmosphere to the ratio of those waters trapped in a Martian meteorite dating back 4.5 billion years.

“The detection of these hydrated salts says there’s water action there”, said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project scientist Richard Zurek.

Last week, NASA said it would be making a major announcement today about a discovery on Mars.

Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, NASA scientists found signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. It makes sense because salts lower the freezing point of water.

After identifying dark areas of Mars, scientists determined that they moved and shifted in size on a seasonal basis.

But he called the apparent confirmation of liquid water “encouraging” and “quite exciting” for those who seek life on the next planet farther from the Sunday .

“The existence of liquid water gives the possibility that, if there is life on Mars, we have a way to describe how it might survive”, he said. The features that extend down the slope during the warm seasons are called recurring slope lineae believed to be formed by salty water flowing down.

Prior to the release of the study, published in Nature GeoSciences, frozen water – ice – was thought to exist on Mars. The planet, with a gravity of just 1 percent that of Earth, lost its water, and the extreme cold meant little could live there.

RSL occur in many different locations on Mars, from equatorial regions up to the planet’s middle latitudes. In the Atacama Desert, salty water deposits are a refuge for active microbial communities, so the discovery widens the perspective of finding microbial life on the Red Planet.