MRO Snaps Phoenix

Sure, it just looks like a picture of two little white dots and a line on a mottled gray background. But it’s actually one of the most amazing photographs ever taken.

As NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft made its descent through the martian atmosphere on Sunday, May 25, another spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), orbiting high above, snapped this image of Phoenix suspended beneath its 40-foot-wide parachute. At the time, Phoenix was hurtling through...

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May 27, 2008 / Written by: Henry Bortman

Liquid Water on Mars: Is It Still Flowing?

The scientific strategy of NASA’s Mars exploration can be summarized as “Follow the water.” The habitability of Mars, past or present, is intimately tied to the presence of liquid water. Since the first orbiting spacecraft, Mariner 9, surveyed the planet in the early 1970s, we have known that the Mars polar caps are composed in part of ice, and we have seen large channels cut by water that flowed on the surface billions of years ago. Two of the most important recent discoveries on Mars were “gullies” that indicate much more recent surface flows, less than a million years old, and the evidence from rovers on the surface that shallow ponds or seas of salty water must have once existed, although they may have been transient. However, all these indications of surface water are old – whether the age is measured in millions or billions of years. Now, in what looks to be one of the most important recent discoveries about Mars, we have photographic evidence that flows of liquid water have taken place in the past seven years! The change of perspective from billions or millions of years to something that happened in the twenty-first century could be profound.

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January 9, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe