Traces of Flowing Water on Mars within the Past Decade

[Comandante]

well, here comes one more reason to start digging. drinks on me

 

"Deposits formed in Martian gullies during the past seven years suggest that liquid water exists on Mars today. Researchers have observed two downhill tracks of light-colored material that were not present in images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft before 1999."

 

from: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=596EADAB-E7F2-99DF-3F373E177D108C1D

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Someone ought to Photoshop Marvin the Martian into one of those pictures...

[swansont]

Someone ought to Photoshop Marvin the Martian into one of those pictures...

 

Mightn't that make him very angry? Very angry indeed?

[swansont]

well, here comes one more reason to start digging. drinks on me

 

"Deposits formed in Martian gullies during the past seven years suggest that liquid water exists on Mars today. Researchers have observed two downhill tracks of light-colored material that were not present in images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft before 1999."

 

from: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=596EADAB-E7F2-99DF-3F373E177D108C1D

 

Unfortunately the article does not explain the reasoning why water has to be responsible instead of something like a dislodged rock.

[Comandante]

Unfortunately the article does not explain the reasoning why water has to be responsible instead of something like a dislodged rock.

 

hmm...It explains why water has to be responsible rather than some other liquid, and although there is no evaluation on the possibility of a dislodged rock I don't see how a dislodged rock could create such an interesting shape...

 

I haven't looked into it too much but on some other sites you can find higher resolution photo of the actual crater which clearly shows the shape of the path so I would say the rendered image is accurate enough. From what I can see in other articles 'scientists' are fairly certain that it was a result of water flow. Will look into it more over the weekend though.

 

Speaking of water below the icey walls of the crater, would it be feasible to mount some strong nanotech projectile with next Mars mission, drop it off from certain altitute and let it accelerate to the surface of the walls of crater and perhaps punch a hole through it?

[Airmid]

Unfortunately the article does not explain the reasoning why water has to be responsible instead of something like a dislodged rock.

 

I listened to the press conference over the internet. There were 2 major reasons to believe why a fluid had to be involved.

First, there's the morphology of the flow. On the more detailed pictures, it can be seen that it flows around obstacles in some cases, and sometimes splits into separate flows that either team up again after the obstacle, or run separate for some distance until the smaller one ends. There's also the shape of the end part of the flow: it splits out in finger-like appendices where the terrain gets more level (the flows are on rather steep slopes, which isn't clear to see on the picture in that article). Dust flows (on earth and on mars) tend to have quite a different morphology, while fluid flows on earth tend to follow the same pattern as these ones.

Second, whenever subsurface material is freshly exposed on Mars, it is of a dark tone. It may bleach in time, but you should rather think in a timespan of millions of years for that to happen, not 7 years.

 

There was one other possibility that has been looked into: that the flow was simply a seasonal frost pattern. However, this has been ruled out, because pictures of the same flow have been made some months apart and the flow pattern has been shown to persist, which could not have been the case if this simply represented frost.

 

Two such new flows have been detected in the past 7 years. There are pictures of other similar flows from Mars, but for those it isn't clear when they were formed.

 

Some more pictures can be seen on the NASA website.

 

Airmid.

[Airmid]

Speaking of water below the icey walls of the crater, would it be feasible to mount some strong nanotech projectile with next Mars mission, drop it off from certain altitute and let it accelerate to the surface of the walls of crater and perhaps punch a hole through it?

 

At least one of the new flows in associated with a fault in the surface of Mars. That's why they came up with the "ice dam" explanation to explain a sudden rush of material to the surface. The fault in the rocks can be seen as a channel which had already been filled with the fluid, but an ice "cork" prevented it from appearing on the surface. A slight increase in pressure could have popped the cork, creating the sudden flow.

 

If this explanation is right, you'd have to aim your nanoprojectile very carefully towards a fault.

 

Airmid.

[Sequence]

looks really interesting. I'm sure the martian wouldn't mind a little publicity. He's fairly vain you know....