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NASA has announced that it has discovered testify of flowing liquid salt water on Mars during the Cherry Planet's summertime months, in what is the biggest indication to date that the planet either has already supported life, or can back up life in the future. The discovery comes thank you to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its imaging spectrometer, which enabled researchers to find telltale signs of hydrated minerals on streaked-looking slopes. Needless to say, this could modify both the class of planetary science and the search for life in and beyond our solar organisation.

These dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks called recurring slope lineae flowing downhill on Mars are inferred to have been formed by contemporary flowing water. (Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

These nighttime, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks called recurring slope lineae flowing downhill on Mars are inferred to take been formed past contemporary flowing water. (Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

"Our quest on Mars has been to 'follow the h2o,' in our search for life in the universe, and now nosotros have convincing science that validates what we've long suspected," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and acquaintance ambassador of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, in a argument. "This is a significant evolution, every bit it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars."

The flows are described every bit recurring slope lineae. Hither's what happens: The hydrated salts lower the freezing betoken of the liquid alkali, the aforementioned way salt helps cook snow and ice on our roads subsequently a blizzard. The darker color on Mars indicates that it's probably a shallow subsurface flow, NASA said. While scientists are all the same able to decide where the water comes from, it appears to dry up in the planet'southward autumn flavor only to start up again the following Mars twelvemonth.

Researchers began studying from the MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) in 2010, and later paired those images with mineral maps from the spacecraft's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM).

"We found the hydrated salts only when the seasonal features were widest, which suggests that either the dark streaks themselves or a procedure that forms them is the source of the hydration," said Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Applied science (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, lead writer of a Nature Geoscience report on these findings. "In either example, the detection of hydrated salts on these slopes means that h2o plays a vital part in the formation of these streaks."

During the announcement today, NASA scientists noted they mined information going as far back as the Viking 1 an two landings in the mid-1970s, as well as from the Phoenix lander in 2008. But the chief data source was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2006 and contains iv other principal scientific discipline instruments in add-on to HiRISE and CRISM.

NASA Mars streaks flowing water

"The ability of MRO to observe for multiple Mars years with a payload able to see the fine particular of these features has enabled findings such as these: showtime identifying the puzzling seasonal streaks and now making a big step towards explaining what they are," said Rich Zurek, MRO project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"Information technology took multiple spacecraft over several years to solve this mystery, and now we know there is liquid water on the surface of this common cold, desert planet," said Michael Meyer, pb scientist for NASA'south Mars Exploration Program at the agency'southward headquarters in Washington. "It seems that the more we report Mars, the more than we learn how life could be supported and where there are resource to back up life in the future."

Back in March, NASA announced the discovery of evidence of an ancient bounding main that covered 20 percentage of Mars' surface. The data from that study, using the ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chilie, seemed to indicate that water persisted on the surface of the Red Planet for at to the lowest degree a billion years. Now it seems that despite the frigid temperatures during the winter and at nighttime, some water withal indeed flows on the surface even today.