Mars the Red Planet
By
Mary Ellison, Carrie Garrison, Toni Smith

The four major seasons of Mars

The mars face is grey and it has creators on it.

This is a closer picture of  the creator on Mars

    The Marinies of Mars
 

 For a video of Mars rotating -- Click Here

In the history of Mars exploration, imaging scientists using data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft have recently observed features that suggest there may  be current sources of liquid water at ornear the surface of the red planet. The new images show the smallest features ever observed from martian orbit -- the size of an SUV. NASA scientists compare the features to those left by  flash floods on Earth.

"We see features that look like gullies  formed by flowing water and the deposits of soil and rocks transported by these flows. The features appear to be so young that they might be forming today.
 

Some of that water went under  ground, and quite possibly it's still there." "For two decades scientists have debated whether liquid water might have existed on the surface of Mars just a few billion years ago," said Dr. Ed
Weiler, Associate Administrator for Space Science, NASA Headquarters. "With today's discovery, we're no longer talking about a distant time. The debate has moved to present-day Mars. The presence of liquid water on Mars has profound implications for the question of life not only in the past, but perhaps even today. If life ever did develop there, and if it survives to the present time, then these landforms would be great places to look."

"Twenty-eight years ago the Mariner 9 spacecraft found evidence -- in the form of channels and valleys -- that billions of years ago the planet had water flowing across its surface," said Dr. Ken Edgett, staff scientist at MSSS and co-author of the paper in Science. "Ever since that time, Mars science has focused on the question, 'Where did the water go?' The new pictures from Global Surveyor tell us part of the answer -- some of that water went under ground, and quite possibly it's still there."

The gullies observed in the images are on cliffs -- usually in crater or valley walls -- and are made up of a deep channel with a collapsed region at its upper end (an "alcove") and at the other end an area of accumulated debris (an "apron") that appears to have been transported down the slope. Relative to the rest of the martian surface, the gullies appear to be extremely young, meaning they may have formed in the recent past.

"They could be a few million years old, but we cannot rule out that some of them are so recent as to have formed yesterday," Malin said.

Left: This picture, which was taken in September 1999 by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, shows a deep, prominent martian gully in a
south-facing wall in Nirgal Vallis near 29.4°S, 39.1°W. Sunlight illuminates the scene from the upper left. At the bottom of the picture is a series of evenly-spaced, almost parallel ridges. These ridges are dunes created by windblown sand. The apron--the fanlike deposit at the lower end of the deep channel--at this location is seen covering some of the dunes. The sand dunes are thus older than the apron of debris that came from the channel. The dune field has no small meteor impact craters on it, so it, like the gully landforms, is geologically young--yet older than the apron. If the dunes are active in the modern environment--which is uncertain despite the apparent youth of the dunes--then the apron would have had to form within the past few centuries or less. [more information about this picture] Credit:  NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

Because the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Mars is about 100 times less than it is at sea level on Earth, liquid water would immediately begin to boil when exposed at the martian surface. Investigators believe that this boiling would be violent and explosive. So how can these gullies form? Malin explained that the process must involve repeated  outbursts of water and debris, similar to flash floods on Earth.