More Proof Of Water Flows Found
The Mars we came to know so well in 1976 and 1977, through front page colour photos from the Viking landers, seems to have gained a lot of new colours in the last six months, as NASA has ramped up the flow of high resolution images from its orbiter now whipping around the planet.
I remember reading back in the early 1980s that an amatuer astronomer claimed NASA had "redded up" the Viking lander photos to make them more "believable", as most people in the 1970s believed the surface of Mars was red or orange. Images of Mars with tinges of blue and green and jade would not have made sense, back then.
This was a claim I saw repeated last year from a Mars fanatic who had spent weeks looking through the thousands of images NASA had posted to the web, which showed detail of tens of thousands of square miles of Mars surface. The Mars fanatic claimed that the many of the images he had seen had been stripped of colour, or "deadened", if I correctly recall the word he used.
From my google searches, it doesn't appear that NASA has adopted an official position on whether or not they alter the colours of the photos they get back from Mars, or now post to the web as is.
Regardless, Mars has certainly changed to Earth eyes in the past three decades, and there are rumours that 2007 will see the announcement of some Big News about what is being found up there.
Presumably, the news will be more detail on the proof of the existence of water on Mars, either still there today, or a rock solid confirmation that it flowed once in great volume across vast tracts of the planet's surface.
Or it just might be something even more extraordinary. Proof of life. Fossil records, or images of something still alive up there right now, even if it is just some kind of slime mould.
The point is that any official announcement of Life On Mars is not likely to prove too shocking to us now. Certainly not as shocking as it might have been back in the 1970s. Interesting to note as well that the belief that beings existed on Mars in the late 1800s was reasonably widespread, particularly in England, which made the release of HG Wells 'War Of The Worlds' in the mid-1890s, which told of a Martian invasion and occupation, not altogether unbelieveable.
For numerous reasons, many involving religion, the belief in life on Mars died out in the early 1900s.
But for now, the re-education from NASA of what the future home for some of the human population of earth is actually all about continues slowly, but steadily.
Here's a couple of stories detailing some of the latest water-related news that goes with these spectacular images.
From the Washington Post :
An orbiting spacecraft has sent back new evidence for the presence of water on Mars. Scientists long have debated whether water flowed on the red planet, with evidence increasing in recent years. The presence of water would raise the possibility of at least primitive life forms existing there.Just last December scientists reported evidence that water may be flowing through Mars' frigid surface. Images from Mars Global Surveyor showed changes in craters that provide the strongest evidence yet that water moved through them as recently as several years ago, and is perhaps doing so even now.
The Surveyor previously had spotted tens of thousands of gullies that scientists believed were geologically young and carved by fast-moving water coursing down cliffs and steep crater walls. Scientists decided to retake photos in a search for evidence of recent activity.
Two craters in the southern hemisphere that were originally photographed in 1999 and 2001 were examined again in 2004 and 2005, and the images yielded changes consistent with water flowing down the crater walls, according to the study.
From the UK Guardian :
A high resolution camera mounted on a spaceship orbiting Mars has found evidence that water once ran under the planet's surface. The geological features could be probed for fossil evidence for past life or used to point to other regions of the planet where running water - and maybe life - can be found today.The pictures were taken by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which was launched in August 2005 and began sending data back from the planet in November last year. They show discoloured rocky ridges in the Candor Chasma, part of a massive canyoned region at the equator called the Valles Marineris, the largest geological rift in the solar system. The ridges are evidence of chemical changes caused by a fluid (almost certainly water) as it flowed down a fissure in the rock.
"The Nasa campaign since 1997 has been 'follow the water'," said Colin Pillinger at the Open University, who led the ill-fated Beagle II mission to land on Mars in 2003. Experiments to look for life should be performed where water is thought to be or to have been.
"That's what Beagle II attempted to do and that would be my strategy if I was doing it again." Examining water-changed rocks would be an obvious place to look for evidence of past life on Mars, he added.
The location of the ridges could be difficult for a spacecraft to land in. The canyoned Valles Marineris is 4,500km long, 200km wide and up to 8km deep.
Below is one of the better quality images from the Viking landers of 1976.
