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TOPIC: Mars Water


L

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Mars Water and ice
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Water and ice have left their marks on the Martian surface, from pits and ridges to winding channels and gullies.
Evidence for past water or water ice on Mars has accumulated rapidly in the past decade. A new study, which will be published in the journal Icarus, paints a scientific picture of flowing rivers and glaciers that likely shaped the topography of the planet's large craters.

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RE: Mars Water
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Phoenix Site on Mars May be in Dry Climate Cycle Phase
Data from the now-defunct NASA Phoenix Mars Lander is shedding light on the current water cycle on Mars, particularly how water moves between the surface and the atmosphere in the northern polar region.


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Martian Clouds
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Clouds scoot across the Martian sky in a movie clip consisting of 10 frames taken by the Surface Stereo Imager on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander.

Clouds scoot across the Martian sky in a movie clip

Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

This clip accelerates the motion. The camera took these 10 frames over a 10-minute period from 2:52 p.m. to 3:02 p.m. local solar time at the Phoenix site during Sol 94 (Aug. 29), the 94th Martian day since landing.
Particles of water-ice make up these clouds, like ice-crystal cirrus clouds on Earth. Ice hazes have been common at the Phoenix site in recent days.
The camera took these images as part of a campaign by the Phoenix team to see clouds and track winds. The view is toward slightly west of due south, so the clouds are moving westward or west-northwestward.
The clouds are a dramatic visualisation of the Martian water cycle. The water vapour comes off the north pole during the peak of summer. The northern-Mars summer has just passed its peak water-vapour abundance at the Phoenix site. The atmospheric water is available to form into clouds, fog and frost, such as the lander has been observing recently.

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L

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RE: Mars Water
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Newly revealed readings from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance indicate that a lot more Martian rocks were altered by water than scientists originally thought.

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L

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Until now, Mars has generally been regarded as a desert world, where a visiting astronaut would be surprised to see clouds scudding across the orange sky. However, new results show that the arid planet possesses high-level clouds that are sufficiently dense to cast a shadow on the surface.
 The results were obtained by the OMEGA Visible and Infrared Mineralogical Mapping Spectrometer instrument on board ESAs Mars Express.
Mars is not entirely a haven for Sun worshippers. Clouds of water ice particles do occur, for example on the flanks of the giant Martian volcanoes. There have also been hints of much higher, wispy clouds made up of carbon dioxide (CO2) ice crystals. This is not too surprising, since the thin Martian atmosphere is mostly made of carbon dioxide, and temperatures on the fourth planet from the Sun often plunge well below the freezing point of carbon dioxide.
Now, a team of French scientists has shown that such clouds of dry ice do, indeed, exist. Furthermore, they are sometimes so large and dense that they throw quite dark shadows on the dusty surface.

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Scientists have found new evidence to support the presence of large oceans on Mars in the past. Published in the June 14 issue of Nature, the research suggests that changes in Mars' orientation with respect to its axis might be responsible for large variations in the topography of shoreline-like features on the planet. Scientists have studied these features for more than 30 years, and the current study presents a new, alternative explanation for how they formed.

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Ancient ocean on Mars
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The case for an ancient ocean on Mars just got stronger.
For years scientists have been baffled by what look like shorelines on Mars. But, impossibly, sea level appears to have been 2.5 kilometres higher in some parts than in others - so many have doubted the ocean really existed. Now Taylor Perron of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues think that massive wobbles in the planet's rotation may explain the mystery.

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No puddles on Mars
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Doh!
The `researcher` who announced the discovery of puddles of standing water on the Martian surface has retracted his claims, after  it was pointed out that the image of the  "water" channels was part of a sloping crater wall.

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Image taken of channels on Burns cliff in Endurance crater, by the Opportunity rover on Nov 17, 2004 (Sol 290)

oppSol290
Expand (626kb, 1024 x 768)
Credit: NASA

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RE: Mars Water
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Strong evidence that Mars once had an ocean
A paper in this week's issue of Nature by University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists demolishes one of the key arguments against the past presence of large oceans on Mars.

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Marss oceanic past has been debated since Viking spacecraft images from the 1970s pinpointed features that seemed similar to shorelines on the Earth. However, in the 1990s, NASAs Mars Global Surveyor revealed that peaks and dips along these features had topographic differences of nearly 3 kilometres. Since old shorelines on Earth remain nearly flat relative to sea level, there was widespread skepticism that these features represented ancient shorelines. In a paper published in the June 14 edition of Nature,, the researchers found that the topography can in fact be explained by a shift in the planets spin axis within the past 2 to 3 billion years. This shift in the rotation pole deformed shorelines that surrounded the long-vanished Arabia and Deuteronilus oceans.

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