When NASA says “significant” they usually mean it:
NASA hosts a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Dec. 6, to present new science results from the Mars Global Surveyor. The briefing will take place in the NASA Headquarters auditorium located at 300 E Street, S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA Television and www.nasa.gov.
The agency last week announced the spacecraft’s mission may be at its end. Mars Global Surveyor has served the longest and been the most productive of any spacecraft ever sent to the red planet. Data gathered from the mission will continue to be analyzed by scientists.
Update:
It looks like water:
The changing appearance of gullies on Mars within the last few years has prompted new hopes that liquid water may have flowed recently on the red planet.
“The water thing clearly is a surprise to us,” Michael Malin, who led a study that found the gully changes, told SPACE.com. “The environment for Mars is not very conducive to water.”
Malin and his colleagues used images from NASA’s now silent Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) to revisit regions earlier this year where gullies, depression-like landforms on the red planet’s surface, were found in 2000.
What they found were new, light-colored deposits that do not appear to have formed from martian landslides, but could be the work of frost, salt deposits or long-sought evidence that water flowed recently on Mars [images].
“Our level of certainty which we can address the question of whether the gully features that we’re reporting on were formed by water is high, but not extremely high,” said Malin, who has lightheartedly referred to the find as “the squirting gun.”
“The evidence is mostly suggestive,” he said.
It isn’t quite the smoking gun but I expect few scientists and observers have doubts about finding liquid water there eventually. The implications, both for our exploration of the universe and the possibility of life existing elsewere, are profund.
