http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/space/5012582/Droplets-on-Mars-Phoenix-Lander-indicate-water.html

Droplets on Mars Phoenix Lander indicate water

Photographs taken of the Mars Phoenix lander appear to show the first evidence of water in its liquid form - an essential ingredient for life, scientists claim

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 11:38AM GMT 19 Mar 2009

Researchers say that what looks like salty, liquid water has been detected on a leg of the Mars Phoenix lander and could be present elsewhere on the Red Planet.

Pictures appear to show droplets on one of the lander's legs which experts believe were water and mud that splashed onto it when the lander touched down.

The droplets appear to darken and merge in the series of images, which Professor Nilton Renno said could prove they are made of liquid water.

It could be a major step in the quest to prove whether there is or ever has been life on Mars.

Professor Renno, one of the investigators on the Phoenix team, said: "A large number of independent physical and thermodynamical evidence shows that saline water may actually be common on Mars.

"Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life. This discovery has important implications to many areas of planetary exploration, including the habitability of Mars."

Previously, water has only been thought to exist on the planet as ice or water vapour because of the very low temperatures.

But researchers reckon pockets of liquid water could exist just under the planet's surface, despite the freezing conditions.

Certain bacteria on Earth can exist in extremely salty and cold conditions.

The findings have been presented in a paper to the Journal of Geophysical Research and will be reported at a conference later this month.

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Is life bubbling up in Mars mud?

20 March 2009 by David Shiga
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IS LIFE bubbling onto the Martian surface in muddy squirts? The discovery of what could be mud volcanoes on the planet suggest it is possible, providing a new focus in the hunt for alien microbes.

Three plumes have recently been identified as sources of methane in Mars's atmosphere (New Scientist, 24 January, p 19). This has led to suggestions that the gas could have been produced by microbes living a few kilometres beneath the surface, where it could be warm enough for liquid water to persist.

This would be difficult to confirm as drilling that deep for samples on another planet is beyond current technology. Now it seems that nature may have done the hard work for us, bringing mud from deep within the planet to the surface via mud volcanoes.

Using images from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, Dorothy Oehler and Carlton Allen of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, identified dozens of mounds at a site in the northern plains of Mars that bear a striking resemblance to mud volcanoes on Earth. These form a distinctive large hill of sediment with a central crater (see photo).

Further evidence comes from infrared images of the Martian mounds, which show that they cool down more quickly at night than rock should, suggesting they are made of a fine-grained sediment such as mud.

Together with David Baker of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Allen and Oehler also took a fresh look at some possible mud volcanoes identified previously by other researchers, about 1000 kilometres further north. Using light spectra of the mounds recorded by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, they found hints of iron oxides, which form in the presence of liquid water. Both studies will be presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, this month.

Jack Farmer of Arizona State University in Tempe agrees that the mounds could be mud volcanoes, but cautions that other processes, like the retreat of glaciers, can leave behind similar heaps of sediment. Nonetheless, studying the clay from mud volcanoes would be of great interest, he says. "Clays have the ability to sequester organic molecules, like ammonia and proteins," he says. "They might retain a memory of any organisms that were there."

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