NASA uses orbital technology to confirm flowing salty water on Mars

Orbital spectroscopy technology was the key factor in NASA’s announcement yesterday that Mars has flowing water on its surface at certain times of the year. The agency pressed infra-red spectrometers on board the decade-old Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (MRO) into service to check out dark narrow streaks which had been photographed creeping down the walls of craters during the Martian summer, and these instruments confirmed the presence of hydrated salts at three craters and one canyon.

MRO carries two instruments that were important for the discovery: a high-resolution camera called HiRISE, attached to the largest reflecting telescope ever carried on a deep-space mission, which was built by Ball Aerospace and Technology under the direction of the University of Arizona; and the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and specifically designed to look for water.

This finding indicates two important things that were previously suspected but unconfirmed: that water is flowing on the Red Planet and also that chemistry is taking place. The salts found by the spectrometers, chlorates and perchlorates, lower the melting point of water in which they are dissolved, rendering it capable of flowing at the Martian summer temperature of approximately -23°C. The researchers responsible for the discovery, led by Lujendra Ojha of Georgia Tech in Atalanta, have published their results in Nature Geosciences.