Super freezing, home to months-long dust storms and featuring the largest volcano in the solar system, Mars isn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat for us.
But we keep searching for proof that it is habitable and that extraterrestrial life exists outside of comic books and sci-fi films.
With the help of a pair of Georgia Tech scientists, NASA on Monday announced the groundbreaking discovery of a possible sign: evidence of flowing water on the Red Planet. The announcement is renewing speculation that life forms — not little green men but perhaps microorganisms — exist on Mars and that earthlings would have a spigot to drink from when astronauts finally land there.
“Our quest on Mars has been to ‘follow the water,’ in our search for life in the universe, and now we have convincing science that validates what we’ve long suspected,” John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a televised briefing. “This is a significant development, as it appears to confirm that water — albeit briny — is flowing today on the surface of Mars.”
Led by Georgia Tech doctoral candidate Lujendra “Luju” Ojha, scientists used instruments on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to study mysterious streaks that snake down the Red Planet’s steep slopes. Those streaks — known as recurring slope lineae or RSL — appear during the warmer seasons and then disappear at colder times during the Martian year. The detection of “hydrated salts” on the slopes, the scientists said, means water is involved in forming those streaks.
Ojha, 25, who immigrated from Nepal to the United States 10 years ago and who used to play guitar in a rock band, first noticed the mysterious lines meandering across Mars five years ago when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona.
“It’s profound knowing there is no other planet in the universe with water on the surface,” he said in a telephone interview from France. “There is Earth, that’s it.”
Ojha’s findings were published Monday in Nature Geoscience. His coauthors include Mary Beth Wilhelm, another Georgia Tech doctoral candidate, and James Wray, an assistant professor at the school. Other coauthors include researchers from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, the Department of Space Studies at Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, and Laboratoire de Planétologie et de Géodynamique in France. Ojha and Wilhelm participated in the NASA briefing.
“Almost 40 years after the Viking landers first analyzed the soils on Mars, it’s exciting that we’re able to expand the places where this important resource might be concentrated on the Red Planet,” Wilhelm said in a prepared statement.
Wray, Ojha and Wilhelm’s adviser at Georgia Tech, was giddy as he prepared to watch NASA’s briefing in Atlanta. He called himself a “proud parent,” saying Ojha and Wilhelm are extremely bright and hardworking.
At each site where the researchers are studying the dark streaks on Mars’ surface there is potentially enough water to fill several Olympic size swimming pools, Wray said. The water flowed in recent days on slopes near the planet’s equator and elsewhere, Wray said, but it is unknown how deep it is and where it is coming from, whether from water vapor, underground ice patches or aquifers.
“It’s the first time we have found flowing water on the surface of another plant beyond Earth,” Wray said. “The fact that we did it here at Georgia Tech means a lot to us personally.”
Wray and a gaggle of reporters then strode into a small conference room on Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus, where they were scheduled to watch the NASA briefing. But the program wasn’t appearing on screen. It eventually did, but only haltingly. Georgia Tech officials fiddled with their Internet connection for a few minutes as Wray scrambled to find an alternative, sheepishly telling the crowd: “Sorry, folks.”
“I thought we were going to have a good show,” he said. “We can find water on Mars from space, but we can’t get access to a web briefing.”
The feed appeared moments later and Wray and the rest of the audience fell into rapt attention. The small group of Georgia Tech students who joined Wray chuckled as a NASA official repeatedly mispronounced Ojha’s first name.
Alexander Sessa, a graduate student from Chicago who is studying planetary science at Georgia Tech, was among those watching with Wray in Atlanta. He said Ojha and Wilhelm helped inspire him to attend Georgia Tech.
“It’s kind of surreal,” he said. “To see people I work with at Georgia Tech in a worldwide news conference discussing brand new results that are of monumental importance, it’s inspiring to me — seeing that I eventually want to do that.”
“It’s cool knowing there is really good, strong planetary research going on at Georgia Tech,” he continued, adding about NASA’s news conference: “There is your evidence right there.”
