Mars tagged posts

This complicates the picture for scientists trying to model the ancient Martian climate, said lead study author Edwin Kite, assistant professor of geophysical sciences and an expert in both the history of Mars and climates of other worlds. “It’s already hard to explain rivers or lakes based on the information we have,” he said. “This makes a difficult problem even more difficult.”

But, he said, the constraints could be useful in winnowing the many theories researchers have proposed to explain the climate.

Mars is crisscrossed with the distinctive tracks of long-dead rivers...

An artist illustration of the InSight lander on Mars. InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough check up since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. The mission will look for tectonic activity and meteorite impacts, study how much heat is still flowing through the planet, and track Mars’ wobble as it orbits the sun. While InSight is a Mars mission, it’s more than a Mars mission. InSight will help answer key questions about the formation of the rocky planets of the solar system.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The touchdown marks the eighth time NASA has successfully landed a spacecraft on Mars. Mars has just received its newest robotic resident...

Hubble Space Telescope photo of Mars taken when the planet was 50 million miles from Earth on May 12, 2016.
Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Bell (ASU), and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute)

Model describing conditions under which oxygenated water could exist on Mars challenges traditional beliefs about planet’s habitability. A team led by scientists at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA, has calculated that if liquid water exists on Mars, it could – under specific conditions – contain more oxygen than previously thought possible. According to the model, the levels could even theoretically exceed the threshold needed to support simple aerobic life.

That finding runs contrary to the current, accepted view of Mars and i...

The central portion of Osuga Valles, which has a total length of 164 km. In some places, it is 20 km wide and plunges to a depth of 900 m. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The valley networks of Mars bear a strong resemblance to those found in arid landscapes on Earth. Researchers have been able to demonstrate this using the branching angles of river valley confluences. Based on these observations, they infer that Mars once had a primeval climate in which sporadic heavy precipitation eroded valleys. The surface of Mars bears imprints of structures that resemble fluvial steam networks on Earth.

Scientists therefore assume that there must have been once enough water on the red planet to feed water streams that incised their path into the soil...