Rover Finds More Traces Suggesting Mars Had Water
Posted on: Thursday, 10 June 2004, 06:00 CDT
The Mars rover Spirit has dug up more evidence of water on the red planet.
At a news conference at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Steven Squyres, the mission's principal investigator and a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, said Tuesday that the rover found residue of sulfur and magnesium in a trench it dug in the Gusev Crater in concentrations that suggest the minerals are combined as magnesium sulfate, or Epsom salt.
Finding the salt below the surface suggests that water percolated through the soil, Squyres said, dissolving the minerals and leaving a residue of salt. He called it "much more compelling evidence than we have found anywhere else" of water in the Gusev Crater region.
"We're not talking about big standing bodies of liquid water" in the distant Martian past, Squyres said, adding: "You don't need a lake to do this. You can perfectly well do this with small amounts of water percolating through the soil."
The other Mars rover, Opportunity, found evidence earlier this year of a great deal of long-ago water on the other side of Mars.
NASA scientists said Tuesday that Opportunity was making a tentative foray into a large crater, Endurance, that has layers of stratified rock that promise to tell more of the story of Martian geological development. The rover will pull out after providing some scouting data, Squyres said, and will allow scientists to check the traction by examining the tread marks in the soil.
Squyres said NASA tests on Earth suggested that the rover would be more than capable of climbing out. Even so, said Firouz Naderi, manager of the NASA Mars Exploration Program, "the potential science benefits of sending Opportunity into the crater are well worth the calculated risk the rover might not be able to climb back out."
Spirit, which has motored more than two miles inside the Gusev Crater, is on its way to a formation known as the Columbia Hills, where scientists hope it will be able to examine bedrock whether on the hills themselves, or in chunks of rock that have tumbled from the heights.
"There is no textbook that tells you how to explore a mountain range with a robot," Squyres said.
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