NASA Confirms Water Does Exist On Present-Day Mars

This announcement came following a weekend’s worth of teasers by NASA to pique interest in the report.

While scientists have largely agreed that the planet consists of ice, the discovery of salty, flowing water represents a new chapter in our understanding of Mars.

“Water is essential to life as we know it”, wrote Lujendra Ojha, Mary Beth Wilhelm, and their co-authors in a paper published Monday in Nature Geoscience. The space agency teased at their find at the end of last week, saying it had solved a mystery with the announcement due today (28 September).

Michael Meyer, the lead scientist on Nasa’s Mars exploration programme, told the Guardian: “There is liquid water today on the surface of Mars”.

We already knew water once flowed on Mars, and the planet likely featured rivers and oceans billions of years ago.

It’s not the first discovery of water on Mars. In this case, using an imaging spectrometer researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious dark streaks are seen on the red planet in dozens of locations.

We might be one step closer to finding alien life. For those salts to exist, water must have been present on the surface within a period of days.

RSL appear during warm weather but fade away when temperatures drop, leading many researchers to speculate that liquid water is involved in their formation. But the addition of salts means that it is much more stable, allowing it to survive on the Red Planet.

“We found the hydrated salts only when the seasonal features were widest, which suggests that either the dark streaks themselves or a process that forms them is the source of the hydration”.

“Under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars”, said Jim Green, NASA’s Planetary Science Director. “Water may be an important resource for future explorers and may decrease the cost and increase the activity of humans on the planet”. Notably, these dark streaks appear to ebb and flow over time-appearing to flow during the warm seasons and then slowly fading in the cooler seasons.

Nasa’s discovery of water running hundreds of metres down the planet’s canyons and craters has been hailed across this world as a scientific breakthrough of huge importance.

“But something happened, Mars suffered a major climate change and lost its surface water”, Green said.