Water, Water Everywhere?

The search for liquid water on Mars.

          The Beginning

Mars exploration has its origins in the Cold War back in the 1960’s.  Russia began launching ships in the hopes of finding some type of life on the planet.  Americans soon followed with the launching of the Mariner ships.  The reason, in the beginning, for looking at Mars was nothing else but curiosity.  But when we realized that the surface bore quite a resemblance to our own, this curiosity soon grew to searching for sings of life past and present.  This begins with the search for signs of water, particularly in it’s liquid form.  The very first landing of  a ship on Mars was Viking 1.  The Viking team was lead by Gilbert Levin, who’s paper “Liquid water and Life on Mars,” co-written with his brother Ron, was the first time a scientist had gone in depth with a claim of signs of water and life, backed up by more than just satellite images.  Further tests went on to dispute Levins’ claims, and thus the debate was on.

New Data Every Day

It seems now that new claims are being made every day about the past existence of water, and not only that, it was there in vast amounts.  Most of the data in the previous years was in the form of Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) data, which takes millions of surface elevation readings and combines them into one topographical image of the Martian surface.  This has given many scientists with enough proof to claim there existed one time oceans.  This MOLA data is combined with existing images to hypothesis the existence of paleo-shorelines. 

            This shoreline discussion has given way a bit recently with the landing of NASA’s Rovers on the Martian surface, which are providing us with unbelievabley detailed images, and the ability to maneuver and do more sophisticated tests with specialized tools.  The existence of gray hematite has been talked about, spurned by images of tiny balls of what are believed to be Hematite. 

        Future Exploration

With all of the data coming back now, the future is sure to hold a number of hypothesis based on interpretation of physical features on the Martian surface.  Elevation data may aid in these interpretations, but much of the data is very cloudy, with much allowance for error.  In the future, much more advanced test must be done, including and most importantly, obtaining samples from the Martian surface and doing more controlled tests.  Until then, to quote an unnamed geologist, “the search for clues to Mar’s past is like going down the block, and along the way picking up a few rocks, and basing Earths history on that.” 

 Figure 1.  MOLA data for surface of Mars. 

References

Carr, M.H. and James W. Head. “Oceans on Mars: An assessment of the observational evidence and

              possible fate.”  Journal of      Geophysical Research.  Vol. 108. 2002.

Clifford, S.M. and T.J. Parker. “The evolution of the Martian hydrosphere: Implications for the fate of

              a primordial ocean and the current state of the Northern Plains.”  Icarus, 154, 40-79,   2001.

Head, J.W., M.A. Kreslavsky, and S. Pratt.  “Northern Lowlands of Mars: Evidence for widespread

              volcanic flooding and tectonic deformation in the Hesperian period.” Journal of Geophysical

              Research, Vol. 107, 2002.

Levin, G.V. and R. Levin.  “Liquid water and life on Mars.”