Water on Mars?

Not to get too hung up on one category, especially as entries here will continue to be few and far between (though hopefully not as much), but this is big news:

NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, which did for areography what Hubble did for astronomy, has produced evidence that liquid flows regularly on Mars. That is, Mars has rivers. Today, not just eons ago. Or if not today, within the last decade, anyway.

I’m exaggerating a bit. What NASA has spotted isn’t a river so much as a gully cut by a sudden but temporary rush of fluid, and it remains to be seen whether that fluid was water or liquid carbon dioxide. But nevertheless, the probably of easily accessible water is a gigantic boon for both the likelihood of Martian life and the capacity of the planet to support permanent human colonization, and perhaps ultimate terraforming.

I can almost see my lanky, pale ancestors now, bobbing along near their lakefront homes on the shores of Hellas Planitia.

Tags: space