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Are These Water Flows On Mars? Quite Possibly, New Observations Reveal
Palikir Crater as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. Visible are warm-season flows called “recurring slope linea” that could have been created by salty liquid water. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA/JHU-APL
What a tangled web of water and water ice stories on Mars. There’s likely some underground. There’s definitely some at the north pole. And we are pretty certain water flowed there in the ancient past. But what about surface water today, right now, in the view of our many orbiting cameras at the Red Planet?
One hotspot of debate are flows called “recurring slope linea”, which are features that appear in warmer temperatures. These would seem to imply some kind of briny water flowing. A team recently checked out 13 of these sites. While they didn’t find any water or salt evidence in the spectra, they did find more iron-bearing minerals on “RSL slopes” compared to those that aren’t. So what’s going on?
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Read the rest of Are These Water Flows On Mars? Quite Possibly, New Observations Reveal (322 words)
© Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, 2014. |
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Post tags: HiRISE, mars reconnaissance orbiter, MRO, recurring slope linea, Water on Mars
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/109236/are-these-water-flows-on-mars-quite-possibly-new-observations-reveal/
