Hot springs that are as acidic as battery acid are home to single-celled microorganisms that may indicate that life could have been sustained on ancient Mars.
Mars
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Detecting Carbonates on the Surface of Mars
A new study shows how a warm, wet climate weathered rocks on early Mars.
Posted inNews
First Possible Marsquake Detected
First earthquakes, then moonquakes, now marsquakes: a robotic lander comes through with the first detection of seismic activity on Mars.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
How Mars Lost Steam
Solar winds are not the main culprit in stripping the planet’s atmosphere, a new study suggests.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
A New Way to Analyze Evidence of Martian Oceans
Mars’s aqueous past holds the answers to many questions about the Red Planet. A new study provides a tool for scouring planetary surfaces for ancient shorelines.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Rover and Lasers Unlock Clues to Early Martian Atmosphere
Sediments from the Curiosity rover and experiments using tanks of gas and laser beams helped reveal how water continued to flow on Mars after the planet lost its atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
The Accidental Particle Accelerator Orbiting Mars
The radar aboard the Mars Express spacecraft can generate ion beams arcing through space above the planet, which could lead to a new way of studying the plasma surrounding it.
Posted inOpinions
Rest in Peace, Spirit and Opportunity
A scientist on the rover team offers a remembrance of two intrepid explorers.
Posted inNews
What Ancient Rivers on Mars Reveal About Its “Great Drying”
Dried-up rivers on Mars suggest that the planet was wet in the not-too-distant past.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Local Heat Source Needed to Form Liquid Water Lake on Mars
Thermal modeling suggests that active magmatism in the past few hundred thousand years could account for the presence of a large lake previously hypothesized beneath the Red Planet’s southern ice cap.