'Mars Mystery Solved'? NASA's Major Space News & Everything We Know So Far Here!

It looks like we will all be on our toes till Monday morning.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) just released a statement that it will be dropping a major Mars news on September 28, Monday. With no other information apart from the conference participants, time, date and venue, NASA is determined to keep the "content" of the announcement under wraps. However, speculations have spurred all over the internet as to what the renowned space agency is going to be revealing.

Space website Inverse's best guess though is the discovery of liquid water on the Red Planet. With Georgia Institute of Technology grad student Lujendra Ojha, a Ph.D candidate in planetary science, being the "odd-person out" of the expert line-up for the conference on Monday, rumours on the existence of water on Mars continues to grow, according to Inverse.

Inverse recalls in the same report that Ojha accidentally discovered "possible flows of salt water on Mars" in 2011 when he was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona. Ojha with independent collaborators McEwen et al had a published work on Science that detailed their findings, Inverse reports.

According to Chron during 2011 CNN report, Ojha harnessed computer algorithm to take out visual distortions from satellite images of Mars. He then noticed a slim snaky features that moved over time. A possible conclusion Ojha and team came up with was that the images represent water.

"There's going to be years of research put into this to even prove that this is definitely proof of water. And from that, we can move on: OK if this is water, what are the chances that life could be in these kinds of surroundings?" Ojha told CNN, as per Chron.

Inverse supposes that if the "discovery" is indeed liquid water, it is possible that the source is underground. This in turn might prove that running water may exist underneath Mars' surface.

Here are the conference participants, as per NASA:

• Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters
• Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters
• Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta
• Mary Beth Wilhelm of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California and the Georgia Institute of Technology
• Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) at the University of Arizona in Tucson

The briefing will start at 11:30 a.m. EDT at the James Webb Auditorium, NASA Headquarters in Washington. Reporters may participate in the brief Q&A session on the event itself or via phone call. The public is also invited to pitch their questions by using the hashtag, #AskNASA. 

For more information about NASA's journey to Mars, visit this link.