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Apparent splashdown on Mars has scientists in a lather - Science - Specials

Apparent splashdown on Mars has scientists in a lather - Science - Specials:

"FOR the first time there is evidence that water still flows on Mars, boosting hopes life may lurk below its red dust.

NASA yesterday released photographs showing two Martian gullies, each hundreds of metres long, covered in whitish deposits.

Space agency scientists said the deposits were not in photographs of the same areas snapped in 1999 and 2001, suggesting both were made by underground water bursting from the surface since then.

If water flowed at two spots so recently, it should be somewhere on Mars today, Australian scientists agreed yesterday.

'I am incredibly excited, ' said Marion Anderson, a Monash University geologist who helped choose landing sites for two robot rovers now exploring Mars. 'This is what we have been hoping to find. There are a lot of theories Mars only had water in its first 2 billion years.'

Malcolm Walter, from Macquarie University's Centre for Astrobiology, said spring water gushing down the gullies probably sank into the soil and froze. Evaporated by sunshine, it resettled as frost in the gullies, forming visible deposits. Another possibility was that the deposits were salt, left by the water.

'There could still be life in these places,' Professor Walter said. 'These are obvious places to go looking for life.'

Jonathan Clarke, a geologist with Mars Society Australia, dedicated to promoting Mars exploration, expressed caution.

'I am not totally convinced. Something has flowed down … it could be dust,' Dr Clarke warned, saying higher resolution pictures were needed. But if there was water 'it would be a potential resource for human explorers and a place biologists would want to study'.

Whatever carved the gullies, Dr Anderson said, 'was certainly behaving like water'. One ended in a classic delta or 'bird's foot' pattern about 50 metres wide.

Dr Anderson speculated that underground water, initially bubbling from crater walls, froze in Mars's thin atmosphere. Water built up behind the ice until it gushed out, gouging the gullies."

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