Red Planet Makes a Splash: Rover finds gush of evidence for past water
By Ron Cowen
A robotic rover on Mars has gathered what scientists are calling the best evidence to date that liquid water once flowed on the Red Planet, soaking rocks thoroughly enough to create possible niches for life.
The combination of images and compositional information provided by the rover is “the clearest lines of evidence for a habitat on Mars, a place hospitable to life,” says James B. Garvin, lead scientist for Mars exploration at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. “This has finally given us a compass direction, a place we want to send a robot to sample material and bring this stuff back.”