Scientists have scored a breakthrough in their foray into Mars - the red planet has been confirmed as having "potentially life-giving water".
"The existence of liquid water, even if it is super salty briny water, gives the possibility that if there's life on Mars, that we have a way to describe how it might survive," announced John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said, as noted by CNN.
The clue that gave this important bit of information away was the long streaks spotted on the steep slopes of the planet, based on the images taken by the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter. The streaks are called slope lineae, and they disappear according to the season. See the photos here.
"The brown splotchy areas in a shot of Mars' Hale Crater are the traces of those liquid flows," Wired explained. "You're not seeing the water itself; instead, the lines are the salt deposits left behind when the water evaporates."
"Long, dark and fleeting, the streaks were first spotted in 2010 by Lujendra Ojha, then an undergraduate at the University of Arizona," National Geographic explained. "Ojha was studying images returned to Earth from the HiRISE camera, aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter."
"The team has associated the streaks with hydrated salts in four different areas where the streaks appear. The salts are called perchlorates and have water molecules trapped in their crystal structures," the science news source said.
However, scientists are still not sure about the water's source. And this will be the next question the researchers will tackle.
"Theories include deliquescence, melting subsurface ice or even a liquid-water aquifer that feeds the process," CNN said. "Discovering what precisely is causing the phenomenon is a mystery for the next round of investigations."
This theory can be likened to Mars sweating saltwater. However, scientists believe that the water may have atmospheric origins.
"If the humidity in the Martian atmosphere gets high enough, perchlorate salts will absorb the atmospheric water until the salt dissolves forms a liquid solution," Mary Beth Wilhelm from the Ames Research Center at NASA said.
Mars has long been known to contain water, as its poles have frozen water.
"Pictures beamed back to Earth in the 1970s showed a surface crossed by dried-up rivers and plains once submerged beneath vast ancient lakes," The Guardian recalled. "Earlier this year, Nasa unveiled evidence of an ocean that might have covered half of the planet's northern hemisphere in the distant past."
While the confirmation that Mars does have liquid water does not guarantee the planet can support human life, the recent findings points to the fact that some areas near the surface of the planet have more habitable conditions than earlier assumed.
And, according to Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at NASA, it is likely that life can be found on Mars.
"It's very likely, I think, that there's life somewhere in the crust of Mars, microbes," he opined.
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