Not even two months after landing on Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover has already found good evidence that water once flowed within Gale Crater! And not just as a random occurrence either, but an honest-to-goodness stream… long-lived and possibly hip-deep, according to both rocks and researchers.
Tag: water
Dawn Makes an Elemental Discovery on Vesta
In what could be called a “eureka” moment for Dawn researchers and planetary scientists alike, hydrogen has been found on the surface of Vesta, a 550-km (340-mile) -wide protoplanet and the second most massive world in our Solar System’s main asteroid belt. The elemental discovery was made with the Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector (GRaND)…
More Evidence for Titan’s Underground Ocean
As Titan travels around Saturn during its 16-day elliptical orbits, it gets rhythmically squeezed by the gravitational pull of the giant planet — an effect known as tidal flexing. Now, if this cloud-covered moon were mostly composed of rock, the flexing would be in the neighborhood of around 3 feet (1 meter.) But based on measurements…
Ancient Ice Found in a Frigid Lunar Crater
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has found water ice lining a deep crater located on the Moon’s south pole — as much as 22% of the surface material of the crater appears to be composed of ice, NASA and university scientists report.
More Evidence for a Wetter, “Volcanier” Mars
Spirit may have settled in for an eternal sleep on Mars but the data she’s sent back is still helping researchers piece together clues for a wetter history of the red planet! The image above, a false-color view from the “Home Plate” region where Spirit now sits, points to a feature geologists call a “bomb sag”….
Water On The Moon!
The conclusive results are in….the LCROSS mission has successfully found water on the lunar surface! Although the plume from the satellite’s upper-stage rocket impact into Cabeus crater at the moon’s south pole was not immediately visible, there was still enough ejected material to be analyzed by LCROSS’ instruments. After reviewing the data over the past…
Gully Gee…
One of thousands of new images released on September 2 from the University of Arizona’s HiRISE project, this amazingly detailed image shows the dramatic effects of erosion on the steep sides of Hale Crater on Mars. Whether or not these channels were caused by liquid water or a dry process is still under investigation. It’s…
Lights in the Dark 