14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, have just announced that the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was recently able to detect a newly-formed gully channel on the surface of the Red Planet. According to mission controllers, this feature may have been formed through erosion by flowing liquids, something that has never been observed directly on Mars.
Just like on Earth, Martian gullies are landforms created by flowing water. Seeing how temperatures are usually too low on our neighboring world to support the existence of liquid water, researchers propose that the liquid that may be flowing on Mars is more akin to brine. Adding salts and other minerals to water is known to decrease its freezing point.
A typical gully is larger than a ditch, but narrower than a small valley, and usually appears in a hillside, along lines where large volumes of liquids are drained downwards. The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument aboard MRO has been keeping track of such structures on the surface of Mars for several years, JPL mission controllers explain.
The new study centers on an area in the southern highlands of Mars, which HiRISE studied in both November 2010 and May 2013. A side-by-side comparison between the two image sets revealed the development of a new gully channel at this location. Researchers say that the only possible explanation for the new feature is the flow of brines or other liquids in the area.
Since the two photos were collected more than one Martian year apart from each other, MRO was unable to identify the season during which these changes occurred. However, the team says that studies conducted with HiRISE elsewhere on the planet revealed that new gullies usually form in the winter.
Mars may not feature water on its surface, but it does have water-ice buried just underneath a thin layer of sand, as well as carbon dioxide ice, or dry ice. These chemicals are very likely to be the main culprits behind these new channels, investigators say, though more studies need to be conducted to confirm this link. A smoking gun evidence would be for HiRISE to catch this process as it happens.
The camera was built by engineers at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado, and is currently operated by scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. It weighs of 65 kilograms (143 pounds) and took $40 million (29 million euros) to assemble. Its resolution level is 0.3 meters (1 foot) per pixel.
MRO, which is managed by JPL for the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington, DC, was launched into space on August 12, 2005, aboard an Atlas V 401 delivery system, from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft achieved orbital insertion around the Red Planet on March 10, 2006.