Evidence for surface liquid water on Mars

Announced via NASA press conference at 11:30 AM EDST. BBC article here.

Dark streaks that come and go with the Martian seasons provide spectroscopic evidence of hydrated salts. Brines of water and these salts would stay liquid long enough to flow down slopes, causing the streaks.

As I understand it, people have long thought that water should be there, but this is the first real evidence. Scientific abstract here.

Of course, now many spectroscopists not in this particular NASA group will be examining these spectra and thinking up alternate hypotheses.

Loved the time-lapse shots of the hillside showing varying states of what is apparently the flow of a watery solution.

I have to admit I am rather impatient with the pace of investigating Ganymede, Europa, Enceladus, etc, promising as they seem with water. I want to know what's there before I die.

>3 stellarexplorer:

Yeah. I hope this moves a manned Mars mission forward a few years, anyway. So my children's children can maybe see it before they die.

Rush Limbaugh thinks that finding water on Mars is part of the Liberal Agenda.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/rush-limbaugh-mars-leftist-plot-214179

I saw a remark on Twitter that the Koch brothers hope to be the first industrialists to pollute water on Mars.

Well, I suppose if this sets of a giant government program to get to Mars, that would be an expanse of government. I'd be in favor of that, though.

>5 jjwilson61:

Just wait until he finds out that the interplanetary EPA has already bungled shit up...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/searching-for-life-in-martian-water-wi...

National Public Radio interviewed James Wray, "one of the authors of a paper discussing the {Mars water discovery}research in the journal Nature Geoscience" and has a podcast of the 12 minute conversation here:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/10/02/2015/on-mars-signs-of-a-wetter-world....

I like that he clarified the water may have several different sources and one of them perhaps "ground water" which would be great for any human activity on Mars. There are "Kim Stanley Robinson Mars series" type conversations ongoing about leaving some areas pristine so as to not contaminate with earth organisms. Well and good but I have not heard of any private Mars colonization projects mention this concept - probably far from the mind of anyone there!

>6 dukedom_enough:

I think the Martians beat them to it. IIRC, those hydrated salts are poisonous, even lethal, chlorates and (GAK!) perchlorates.

Not exactly the potable stuff that's ready to drink after a little wait for the sediment to settle.

>10 Limelite: Right, very inhospitable planet.