The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter has uncovered signs that Mars once had a vast network of waterways, including a planet-spanning ocean in its northern hemisphere, and an extensive network of rivers that carved majestic canyons through the ancient Martian landscape. Using its Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurfaceread more
Although it’s found on another planet altogether, there’s a permanent "winter wonderland" on Mars that would never suffer a green Christmas — or a red one, as the case may be. The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter used its High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) to take pictures of the 82 kilometer (51 mile)-wide Korolev crater near Mars’ north pole, home to a massive mound made of water ice that persists year-round due to the crater’s peculiar topography.
Korolev crater’s ice sheet is 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) deep, and with a volume of 2,200 cubic kilometers (530 cubic miles), the ice pack holds a similar amount of water in ice form as Canada’s Great Bear Lake, or five times that of Lake Erie. read more
Researchers working with the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft have found strong evidence for a sub-glacial lake of liquid water under Mars’ southern polar ice cap.read more
NASA has just announced two major breakthroughs in the search for life on Mars: the first is that the Mars Curiosity rover has detected the presence of organic molecules preserved within the bedrock of the Martian soil; the other is that Curiosity has also detected a wide variation in the amount of methane present in the Martian atmosphere that fluctuates with the planet’s seasons. Although NASA cautions that these phenomena could ultimately have non-biological origins, they add to the growing evidence that Mars, once home to a habitable environment, might very well have had lifeforms of its own–lifeforms that may still be living there today.
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