Vacations on Mars!

NASA Orbiter Provides Insights About Mars Water and Climate
September 20, 2007

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is examining several features on Mars that address the role of water at different times in Martian history.
Features examined with the orbiter's advanced instruments include material deposited in two gullies within the past eight years, polar ice layers formed in the recent geologic past, and signs of water released by large impacts when Mars was younger. Last year, discovery of the fresh gully deposits from before-and-after images taken since 1999 by another orbiter, Mars Global Surveyor, raised hopes that modern flows of liquid water had been detected on Mars. Observations by the newer orbiter, which reached Mars last year, suggest these deposits might instead have resulted from landslides of loose, dry materials. Researchers report this and other findings from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in five papers in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
"The key question raised by these two deposits is whether water is coming to the surface of Mars today," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson, lead scientist for the spacecraft's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera and co-author of three of the papers. "Our evidence suggests the new deposits did not necessarily involve water." One of the fresh deposits is a stripe of relatively bright material several hundred yards long that was not present in 1999 but appeared by 2004.
The orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars reveals the deposit is not frost, ice or a mineral left behind by evaporation of salty water. Also, the researchers inspected the slopes above this and five other locations that have bright and apparently young deposits. The slopes are steep enough for sand or loose, dry dust to flow down the gullies. Bright material seen uphill could be the source. Other gullies, however, offer strong evidence of liquid water flowing on Mars within the last few million years, although perhaps at a different phase of repeating climate cycles.
Mars, like Earth, has periodic changes in climate due to the cycles related to the planets' tilts and orbits. Some eras during the cycles are warmer than others. These gullies are on slopes too shallow for dry flows, and images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's high-resolution camera show clear indicators of liquid flows, such as braided channels and terraces within the gullies.

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(covacha’s opinion) So…what about invading other places on universe? If we have destroyed an entire planet, why don’t another? At last, there are nine… so what’s the matter? There’s no one that could reclaim us…NOOOOO! That’s not the way things should be. Sometimes it seems to me that they are more worried about finding any other possibilities of living in other places, than in caring the place in which we are living NOW! But…it might be only my perception. I am obviously agreed with development of the science and technology, to improve our future, but what about our present? I think we should take more care about the present health of our lives and of our home, the earth, than of the live of others, and sometimes others we don’t even know, like the extraterrestrials, and than other places that aren’t ours. …Even though, all these things about “new” findings in other planets, especially Mars, are veeeery wasted to the point that it suddenly seems us boring. However, any kind of research and development of investigation I think is really good.