Has liquid water flowed on Mars in this decade?
In June 2000, we reported the discovery, using the Mars Global Surveyor's
Mars Orbiter Camera, of very youthful-looking gullies found on slopes at
middle and high latitudes on Mars. Since that time, tens of thousands of
gullies have been imaged by all of the Mars orbiting spacecraft: Mars
Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter.
During the years since the original June 2000 report, the Mars Global
Surveyor's camera was used to test the hypothesis that the gullies may be
so young that some of them could still be active today. The test was very
simple: re-image gullies previously seen by the camera and see if anything
has changed.
In two cases, something changed. One of those cases is presented here. A
gully on the wall of an unnamed crater in Terra Sirenum, at 36.6 degrees
south, 161.8 degrees west, was initially imaged by the camera on Dec. 22,
2001 (Figure A, left). It showed nothing noteworthy at the location where
a change would later be observed, but a group of nearby gullies exhibited
an unusual patch of light-toned material. As part of our routine campaign
to re-image gully sites using the camera, another image of this location
was acquired on April 24, 2005. A new light-toned deposit had appeared in
what was otherwise a nondescript gully (Figure A, right). This deposit was
imaged again by the camera on Aug. 26, 2005, at a time when the sun angle
and season were the same as in the original December 2001 image, to
confirm that indeed the light-toned feature was something new, not just a
trick of differing lighting conditions. In August 2005, the feature was
still present.
Figure A: This set of images shows a comparison of the gully site as it
appeared on Dec. 22, 2001 (left), with a mosaic of two images acquired
after the change occurred (the two images are from Aug. 26, 2005, and
Sept. 25, 2005). Sunlight illuminates each scene from the northwest (top
left). The 150-meter scale bar represents 164 yards.
Figure B: This is a mosaic of images that cover the entire unnamed crater
in Terra Sirenum. The location of the light-toned gully deposits, old and
new, is indicated. This is a mosaic of images acquired by the camera in
2005 and 2006. The 500-meter scale bar equals approximately 547 yards.
Figure C: This image shows an enlargement of a portion of another image
from August 2005, showing details of the new, light-toned gully deposit.
The new material covers the entire gully floor, from the point at which
the gully emerged from beneath a mantled slope, down to the spot at which
the channel meets the crater floor. At this break in slope, the gully
material, as it was emplaced, spread out into five or six different
fingers (this is called a "digitate" termination as in finger digits).
The 75-meter scale bar represents a distance of about 82 yards.
Figure D: To confirm that the new, light-toned gully deposit is not just
a trick of changing illumination conditions as the sun rises to different
levels in the sky each season, the Mars Orbiter Camera team repeatedly
imaged this site throughout 2005 and 2006. Four examples are shown here,
acquired in April 2005, August 2005, February 2006 and April 2006. The
"i=" indicates solar-incidence angle, or the height of the sun in the
local sky, relative to a case where the sun would be directly overhead
(i=0 degrees). Thus, the higher the incidence angle, the lower the sun
would appear in the sky to an observer on the ground.
These images show that a material flowed down through a gully channel,
once between December 2001 and April 2005. After the flow stopped, it left
behind evidence -- the light-toned deposit. The deposit is thin enough
that its thickness cannot be measured in the camera's 1.5-meters-per-pixel
images. However, it does exhibit a digitate termination, suggesting that
the material flowed in a fluid-like manner down the approximately 25
degree slope before splaying out into multiple small lobes at the point
where the crater wall meets the crater floor and the slope suddenly drops
to near zero. This deposit, and a similar one in a crater in the Centauri
Montes, together suggests that the materials involved were low-volume
debris flows containing a mixture of sediment and a liquid that had the
physical properties of liquid water. In this case, we propose that the
water came from below the surface, emerged somewhere beneath the mantle
covering the original crater wall, and then ran down through a previously
existing gully channel. No new gully was formed, but an old one was
re-activated.
The light tone of the new gully deposit, and that of the older,
neighboring gullies, is intriguing. We cannot know from these images
whether the light tone indicates that ice is still present in and on the
surface of the deposit. Indeed, ice may not be likely: under present
conditions on the surface of Mars, ice would be expected to have sublimed,
or vaporized, away fairly shortly after the new deposit formed. However,
the light-toned material could be frost that forms and re-forms frequently
as trapped water-ice sublimes and "exhales" from within the deposit.
Alternatively, the light-tone may result if the deposit consists of
significantly finer grains (for example, fine silt) than the surrounding
surfaces, or if the deposit's surface is covered with minerals such as
salts formed as water evaporated from the material.
Do these images prove that water has flowed on Mars? No, they cannot.
However, they provide the first very tantalizing evidence that this may
have occurred. While the surface environment on Mars is extremely dry,
drier than the most arid deserts on Earth, liquid water from beneath the
Martian surface may have come out of the ground and flowed across this
little portion of the red planet in this decade.
The Mars Global Surveyor mission is managed for NASA's Office of Space
Science, Washington, by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology, also in
Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, developed and operates
the spacecraft. Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, Calif., built and
operates the Mars Orbiter Camera.
For more information about images from the Mars Orbiter Camera, see
http://www.msss.com/mgs/moc/index.html.