Still, though, the water detected in the soil (in this case, of the Gale Crater, the area the rover is exploring) is a big deal — a confirmation of yet another way that Mars and Earth are more similar than it may appear to the naked eye. The news came via a series of five papers published in the journal Science — the first set, The Guardian‘s Alok Jha notes, “of formal, peer-reviewed results from the Curiosity mission.” The papers offer details of the scientific experiments Curiosity carried out during the first four months it spent tooling around on the Martian surface. And investigations into the planet’s water content were among them.
How much water, actually, is present in the soil of Mars? A decent amount, it seems. According to Laurie Leshin, the dean of science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the lead author of the Science paper that confirmed the existence of water in the soil, “If you took about a cubic foot of the dirt and heated it up, you’d get a couple of pints of water out of that.” Which is, she notes, “a couple of water bottles’ worth that you would take to the gym.” (NB: Don’t take Martian water to the gym.) Overall, Leshin and her colleagues estimate, the Martian soil contains about 2 percent water by weight. Which is still arid by Earth standards … but moister than nothing. It means that if you’re looking for water on Mars, as Leshin puts it, “You don’t need to go to the polar caps. You don’t need to dig way down deep.”
So: Let’s celebrate the newly detected Martian Moisture! With photos! Below, culled from Space.com‘s wonderfully lengthy image collection, a retrospective: Water on Mars — as we’ve witnessed it, as we think it to be, and as we imagine it once was. For more, see the full (and amazing) 34-i
Update: I neglected to include, in the series above, the most detailed and definitive water-on-Mars image — created by Ellen Roper, archived by NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, and sent to me by reader Paula Naughtin:
Article Appeared @http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/water-on-mars-a-brief-and-extremely-long-history/280066/