Mars pictures reveal frozen sea
 

Their assessment is based on pictures of the planet's near-equatorial Elysium region that show plated and rutted features across an area 800 by 900km.

The team think a catastrophic event flooded the landscape five million years ago and then froze out.

They tell a forthcoming edition of Nature magazine that sediments covered the ice, locking it in place.

Large reserves of water-ice are known to be held at the poles on Mars but if this discovery is confirmed by follow-up observations, it would be a first for a region at such a low latitude.

Dust covering

"It's been predicted for a long time that you should find water close to the surface of Mars near the equator," Jan-Peter Muller, from University College London, UK, said.

"This is an area where there are a lot of river features but no-one has ever seen a sea before, and certainly no-one has ever seen pack ice before," he told the BBC News website.

The interpretation is based on images taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Europe's Mars Express spacecraft. These show extensive fields of large, platy features - reminiscent of the fractured ice floes found in polar regions on Earth.

Finding exposed ice at the equator would be unlikely. Very low pressures on the planet would lead to sublimation - the ice would erode over time straight to water vapour.

But the research group, led by John Murray, from the Open University, UK, tells Nature that a crust of dust and volcanic ash, perhaps just a few centimetres thick, has prevented this happening.

"The story runs that water flowed in some kind of massive catastrophic event; pack ice formed on top of that water and broke up, and then the whole thing froze rigid," explains Professor Muller.

"Large amounts of dust then fell over that area. The dust fell through the water and on top of the pack ice, which explains why the pack ice is a different hue to the area around it."


Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4285119.stm

if this is true then can we expect another mars rover to land there and dig into the ice?

i would think that if anything living had been hit by the flood, then its frozen somewhere in that ice pack. This is almost as good as having it framed and presented to us as proof that somehting lived on mars at one point. :lol:

The water on Mars is vitally necessary for terraformation so definitely good news... For those more interested in Mars possible terraforming I recommend http://www.redcolony.com/

i saw that on the news. real intresting even though not too surprising

so what if we discovered life on Mars? why don't we spend the billion of dollars saving lifes on Earth?

to hell with finding life on Mars.... they should find some OIL in there as I fear for a future where cars run on electricity!

Oil on mars? :lol: J/P
wow this is some interesting news! Thanks alot!

The hot topic around NASA now
WASHINGTON -- A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water.



The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.



What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.



Stoker and other researchers have long theorized that the Martian subsurface could harbor biological organisms that have developed unusual strategies for existing in extreme environments. That suspicion led Stoker and a team of U.S. and Spanish researchers in 2003 to southwestern Spain to search for subsurface life near the Rio Tinto river—so-called because of its reddish tint—the product of iron being dissolved in its highly acidic water.


After the Apollo program, there has been a serious lack of exploration. Sure, we sent the Viking landers to Mars. Very primitive landers that left us with more questions than answers. The Pioneer and Voyager probes were more successful as far as stimulating the scientific community. Most of the technology that we use today; I know you've heard this a million times, has been a by-product of past space program technology. The medical telemetry technology that doctors and paramedics use, born from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. If we can just get the private sector to invest more in in the privatization of space, then bigger things will happen. Anyways, these current ventures are cheap, they don't cost much to the taxpayer. And, we are (human) born to explore. We've been cocooned in our comfort shell for too long. Our civilization needs to take chances again or we become more stagnant.

does anyone else forsee what was said in Fight Club as coming true? :? I can seriously see the moons of Jupiter being renamed after the companies that paid for their exploration :?

@Demon- Theroreticaly, Electric cars have an unlimited amount of horsepower :wink: You would just have to find an unexauhstible power supply for it and bingo-bango, you've got a 500HP Insight :lol:

@23790554- What's the point? Immortality is a fairy tale. People will die regardless of how much money gets spent to save them. If you ask me, that's more of a waste than shooting a monkey into space. Look what weve gotten from that. A fatass space station, 400+ satellites floating around the earth giving you 500+ channels of TV to fry your brain on, watching the weather to tell you not to go outside tomorrow because you'll end up with a lightning bolt through your ears and so on.

Also @ 23790554.
The space program has contributed alot of materials and advancement to your every day life.
Ultimately Id like to see it become privatitized and think it will as technology diseminates down, but one cannot denny that even the truly poor have benefited from things invented and learned in space.

Hate to spoil your idea here, but isn't oil from decayed remains of plants and animal life. . .