Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Ancient Lake on Mars?

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has brought back images from Mars of "impact megabreccia" (I googled this and it means huge areas of mixed-up, broken rock held together by a finer-grained material, found in impact craters and volcanoes here on Earth) and what might possibly have been a once-habitable ancient lake. It seems this possible lake filled the crater, Holden crater, long ago and it now holds some of the best-exposed lake deposits and old megabreccia ever on Mars, including minerals that formed "in the presence of water and mark potentially habitable environments". Very exciting! Check it out:

http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=6711

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