Annihilation Community
http://tribes.thelandofoz.net/
If you're holding out for them to find something of actual interest you might be frustrated to find out how underfunded and slow the future planned missions to determine these sorts of things are.Scientists have long known that large amounts of water remain — but frozen solid in the polar ice caps. There have been fleeting hints of recent liquid water, like fresh-looking gullies, but none have proved convincing.
In 2011, Dr. McEwen and colleagues discovered in photographs from the orbiter dark streaks descending along slopes of craters, canyons and mountains. The streaks lengthened during summer, faded as temperatures cooled, then reappeared the next year.
They named the streaks recurring slope lineae, or R.S.L.s, and many thousands of them have now been spotted. “It’s really surprisingly extensive,” Dr. McEwen said.
Scientists suspected that water played a critical role in the phenomenon, perhaps similar to the way concrete darkens when wet and returns to its original color when dry.
But that was just an educated guess.
Lujendra Ojha, a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, turned to an instrument on the orbiter that identifies types of molecules by which colors of light they absorb. But this instrument, a spectrometer, is not as sharp as the camera, making it hard to zoom in on readings from the narrow streaks, a few yards across at most.
“We had to come up with new techniques and novel ways to do analysis of the chemical signature,” said Mr. Ojha, the lead author of the Nature Geoscience article.
The researchers were able to identify the telltale sign of a hydrated salt at four locations. In addition, the signs of the salt disappeared when the streaks faded. “It’s very definitive there is some sort of liquid water,” Mr. Ojha said.
You would think by now surely we would have a large push to at least send people to the moon with HD cameras and also set up a sort of staging base for future missions further than the moon, but in reality actual people haven't gone far from the very beginning of space since the early 70s? The ISS is only 250~ miles up which is right next to the earth barely in orbit. Instead we throw endless amounts of money into the military industrial complexEven though recurring slope lineae appear to be some of the most intriguing features on Mars, NASA has no plans to get a close-up look anytime soon.
They are treated as special regions that NASA’s current robotic explorers are barred from because the rovers were not thoroughly sterilized, and NASA worries that they might be carrying microbial hitchhikers from Earth that could contaminate Mars.
Of the spacecraft NASA has sent to Mars, only the two Viking landers in 1976 were baked to temperatures hot enough to kill Earth microbes. NASA’s next Mars rover, scheduled to launch in 2020, will be no cleaner. Sterilizing spacecraft, which requires electronics and systems that can withstand the heat of baking, adds to the cost and complicates the design.
In selecting the landing site for the 2020 rover, the space agency is ruling out places that might be habitable, including those with recurring slope lineae.
That prohibition may continue even though two candidate streaks have been identified on the mountain in Gale Crater that NASA’s Curiosity rover is now exploring, a mile or two from its planned path.
NASA and the Curiosity team could decide to approach the streaks without driving onto them, or to simply observe from a distance. The rover is still probably a couple of years away.
