flowing water on mars?

[Marshmallowman]

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro20110804.html

haha beat you to the link my good Dr Mordrid

[Elie]

Noooo way! You beat the Doc!!

Doc you are slipping man

Anyway that looks more like a dust storm than water. Ultimately we need to further investigate that planet by sending astronauts, or reliable probes that can scan the entire surface up close from only 1km high or less.

[Evildead666]

Maybe they could deploy a small(ish) UAV on the planet ? Would have to be electric or solar though to not contaminate the atmosphere.

[Dr Mordrid]

The Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity rover launches this Nov/Dec and should be on the surface this time next year. It's much larger, about the dimensions of a Mini Cooper with 10x the mass of instruments, is nuclear powered and is going to do a precision landing in the Gale crater. Might get a shot at examining brine flows there, or at least the salt deposites left after the water evaporated. Launch will be on an Atlas V 541 (5 meter fairing, 4 solid boosters and a 1 engine Centaur second stage.)

Then comes the proposed Red Dragon mission in 2018 which would deliver more instrumentation than all the previous Mars missions combined, including a drill rig.

Sojourner (front) MER (left) v Curiosity (right)


Gale and the landing zone

[Brian Ellis]

Peculiar! I carefully examined the Mars I had access to. It had a thin brown brittle crust and under it was a thick gooey mixture of indeterminate composition, coloured somewhere between ivory through buff to light brown. However, no running water was detected. It had a sweetish aroma and, upon ingestion, my blood sugar shot up from its average 92 to peak at 187 after 38 minutes, after which it declined exponentially with a folded-e lifetime of 10.286 hours reaching 1% from asymptote after 22 hours.

[Dr Mordrid]

I think Brian is feeling better. Either that or his AC came back on

[Evildead666]

If he's managed to eat a Mars without a spoon, he must be cooler