Dried-up rivers on Mars suggest that the planet was wet in the not-too-distant past.
planetary surfaces
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.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
New Hints About How Martian Moons Formed
A new study finds that Phobos includes chunks of Martian crust.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Revisiting Enigmatic Martian Slope Streaks
Slope streaks of different sizes and shapes are a common feature on the surface of Mars, but scientists disagree about the mechanisms for their formation and development.
Posted inNews
Martian Crater Will Be the Landing Site for a Future Rover
The impact crater is a dry lake bed that contains evidence of ancient water flows and perhaps signs of ancient microbial life.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Searching for Signs of Marsquakes
Researchers use high-resolution images of Mars’s surface to look for signals of coseismic displacement.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
How Jupiter’s Icy Moons Got Their Bands and Grooves
Europa’s churning ice crust could reveal signs of ocean life, new study suggests.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Peering Through Titan’s Haze to Better Understand Its Surface
Variations in grain size and water ice content detected on Saturn’s largest moon offer evidence of geologically related units that resemble the mountain-to-desert transition on Earth.
Posted inScience Updates
Planetary Dune Workshop Expands to Include Subaqueous Processes
The Fifth International Planetary Dunes Workshop: From the Bottom of the Oceans to the Outer Limits of the Solar System; St. George, Utah, 16–19 May 2017
Posted inNews
Four Planetary Landscapes That Scientists Can’t Explain
These are just a handful of the hundreds of mysterious features across our solar neighborhood that beg to be studied closer.