Latest Water on Mars Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study from an international group of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) reveals that snowstorms that lash the northern hemisphere of Mars during the harsh winters may be predicted several weeks in advance. The team’s calculations reveal a connection between the snowfalls and a weather phenomenon special to Mars: fluctuations of pressure, temperature, wind speeds and directions that in...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A unique find beneath frozen Alaskan sand dunes suggests that liquid water may still exist on the Red Planet. Scientists from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) performed field studies of the Great Kobuk Sand Dunes and found the presence of liquid water during Arctic winter there, suggesting that liquid water could be temporarily stable at frost-covered sand dunes on Mars. They conducted fieldwork in Kobuk Valley National Park,...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For the first time ever, new maps of the subsurface of Mars show buried channels below the surface of the planet. These channels suggest evidence of flooding on a planet that has been considered by scientists to be cold and dry for the last 2.5 billion years. The young channels are located in Elysium Planitia, an expanse of plains along the equator. This region is also the youngest volcanic region on Mars. Understanding the scale and...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists will never know who first looked to the heavens and noticed the pale pink, barely visible orb that graces our early morning skies. We do know the Greeks named the red planet Ares in honor of their god of war. It wasn’t until the Romans came on the scene and renamed this celestial sphere for their own god of war, however, that we came to know our heavenly neighbor as Mars. Over the years, Mars has received a lot of...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online More evidence is coming in Mars used to be thriving with ancient riverbeds, according to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Brown University researchers found networks of narrow ridges in impact craters on Mars that appear to be fossilized remnants of underground cracks through which water once flowed. The study adds more weight to the growing pile of evidence Mars once had an active hydrology and...

[ Watch the Video: Mars Dry Ice and Dunes ] April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study, led by the Planetary Science Institute's Senior Scientists Candice Hansen, shows that the spring thaw on Mars leads to a variety of geologic changes on the planet's surface. Frozen carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, is deposited on the dunes surrounding the north pole's permanent water ice polar cap. In the spring, as it begins to sublimate, or change directly from a...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has discovered evidence of a wet underground environment which suggests the planet could have once been home to a groundwater-fed lake, the US space agency announced on Sunday. The new data is the result of spectrometer data collected by the probe of the floor of McLaughlin Crater, which is 57 miles in diameter and 1.4 miles deep. The depth of the crater apparently allowed water to flow...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express has offered up a high-resolution photo of a river-like structure on Mars. The spacecraft used its high-resolution stereo camera last year to snap an image of Reull Vallis on the Red Planet. Reull Vallis is a river-like structure believed to have formed when running water flowed in the distant martian past. The ancient river bed cuts a steep-sided channel through the Promethei Terra...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A larger portion of the Mars surface is covered by clay minerals - a type of rock that typically forms in places where water is present over an extended period of time - than was previously believed, claims a new study published in the current online edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Eldar Noe Dobrea of the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) and colleagues identified the clay minerals using a spectroscopic...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers have found evidence that ancient caverns on Mars may have captured enormous flood waters some 2 billion years ago. Planetary Science Institute researchers studied the terminal regions of the Hebrus Valles, which is an outflow channel that extends about 155 miles downstream from two zones of surface collapse. The Martian outflow channels are made up of some of the largest known channels in the solar system....