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The study of strange recurring streaks on the walls of craters has led scientists to strong evidence of flowing briny surface water on Mars. Does this boost the chances of life on the Red Planet?

Mars orbiter confirms briny water flows on present-day Mars


Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer

Monday, September 28, 2015, 12:47 PM - The study of strange recurring streaks on the walls of craters has led scientists to strong evidence of flowing briny surface water on Mars. Does this boost the chances of life on the Red Planet?

Our exploration of the planet Mars has yielded a view of the planet where it was much warmer and wetter in the past, possibly a rich environment for life to have formed.

New research of dark streaks on the walls of Mars craters - known as recurring slope lineae or RSL - is showing that present-day Mars may be far more habitable than we thought.

These recurring slope lineae, which have been detected now for years by Mars orbiters, appear seasonally, spreading down the slopes of craters in warmer weather and retreating in colder weather.

Water has always been seen as a suspected cause of these streaks, however scientists now have their first direct evidence for water's involvement in their formation.


DOES THIS MEAN LIFE ON MARS? Read on to find out what the discovery means for present - or past - life on the Red Planet.


"When most people talk about water on Mars, they're usually talking about ancient water or frozen water," said Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who is the lead author of a report on these findings published Sept. 28 by Nature Geoscience. "Now we know there’s more to the story. This is the first spectral detection that unambiguously supports our liquid water-formation hypotheses for RSL."

The water detected by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is not anything that humans could drink. It is in the form of a briny solution - hydrated salts of a chemical known as perchlorate, which was first detected on Mars by the Phoenix lander in 2008. This solution was found to remain in liquid form well below freezing temperatures, down to -70 degrees Celsius.

"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," Ojha said. "In either case, the detection of hydrated salts on these slopes means that water plays a vital role in the formation of these streaks."


These "warm-season flows" on the slope of Newton Crater, as imaged by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are a perfect example of the briny water flows discussed in Monday's announcement. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Potential for life?

The surface of Mars is extremely hostile to life as we know it.

It's freezing cold most of the time, even at the equator, with temperatures that would kill most forms of life. The atmospheric pressure is less than 1 per cent of Earth's atmosphere. This not only means that flowing liquid fresh water, and even ice on the surface, would quickly evaporate away, but it leaves the surface exposed to intense radiation, including deadly ultraviolet rays from the Sun. The lack of a planetary magnetic field, like Earth's, also leaves the surface open to bombardment by much harsher forms of radiation from space as well.

This combination of conditions is not good news for any life that would attempt to live there.

While surface water has been detected on Mars already, as the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers have drilled into surface rocks, that water was locked away in the rock structure as an artifact of past conditions.

The presence of this briny salt solution actively flowing at the surface does raise the chances for life to be currently living on Mars, simply by the detection of flowing water.

Next steps?

The real question from this discovery becomes - where did the water for this briny solution come from?

Is it drawn directly from the air, in a process known as deliquescence, with the perchlorates absorbing water vapour until the solution is formed? Does it seep up to the surface from a larger underground source of freshwater?

These are the next steps in the investigation.

"Our quest on Mars has been to 'follow the water,' in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water - albeit briny - is flowing today on the surface of Mars."

Time to go?

In some ways, this is the news we've been waiting for, when it comes to the potential for colonizing Mars.

Discovering that past Mars had abundant surface water is interesting, but not useful. Locating trillions of tons of water ice buried under the surface is great, however, accessing that water adds unwanted complications for any effort to visit or colonize Mars.

Flowing water on the surface of present day Mars, though, is a completely different story.

"Actual liquid water is key to sending humans to Mars," says Dr. Livio Tornabene, research scientist at University of Western Ontario who has worked on the MRO team "This discovery may fuel a new space race to the Red planet!" 

Not only is surface water a viable source of drinking water for a human crew, but Tornabene's reference to fuel is somewhat literal as well. This is due to the fact that water can also be used to make rocket fuel, which overcomes one of the biggest hurdles to cross when considering how to get Mars astronauts back to Earth.

Source: NASA | Nature Geoscience | NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

RELATED VIDEO: This animated simulation from NASA shows seasonal flows, each roughly the length of a football field, on the slopes of Hale Crater, one of the sites investigated by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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