True colours of mars and vegitation

trying to find the correct place to post this, but is this really a "forest"? i read this is from the mars orbit.
www.msss.com...

more from here:
www.marsanomalyresearch.com...

On the other hand, very close by to the M10-00628 site is the above third image based on the M09-01354 official science strip where a surface water lake site is a little more identifiable but still the water surface is obscured by image tampering

How do you expect that at more than 70 degrees latitude you would find liquid water on Mars when even back here on Earth is a bit of a problem above the polar circle?

Have you read this thread? You would find some interesting post about the subject.

ok, so what is the first image patterns made of in your opinion?

Originally posted by reaganero
ok, so what is the first image patterns made of in your opinion?

something like this but a larger scale



and also like this

that comes from here

There could be lava flow or something else near the surface, that would make some spots on mars hotter then others, look at Siberia it gets down to -70 C if I remember correctly and forest still persist and rivers. but they freeze over.

Originally posted by trIckz_R_fO_kIdz
There could be lava flow or something else near the surface, that would make some spots on mars hotter then others, look at Siberia it gets down to -70 C if I remember correctly and forest still persist and rivers. but they freeze over.

The Siberian forests exist below that region of permafrost where it never rises above freezing. So that is not a good example for an area of Mars where the surface temperature rarely rises above -70 C.

Also, the geothermal is a good point, but there is no geothermal activity on Mars, so it's futile.

Originally posted by Apass
Ok...so we found another thread in wich to argue if there is life or not on Mars.
I don't have photos of things that look like trees.

www.space.com...
02.jpg&cap=Odd%20looking%20structures%20on%20Mars%20look%20like%20Banyan
%20trees%20explains%20noted%20writer,%20Arthur%20Clarke

www.msss.com...

And a interview with Arthur C Clarke about this photo's above.

www.space.com...

And then for a vast amount of information ...

www.marsanomalyresearch.com...
.
There is no reason for you not to know whats going on beside your obvious attempts to avoid knowledge.

I have only photos of some dark spots in the polar caps on Mars that can be anything (CO2/sand geysers or maybe trees or whatever they are).

Conclusion and biological interpretation of DDSs: We
found that the circular shape of DDSs is independent from
local small-scale topographic variation. Fig. 4 shows surface
pattern of grooves on the top of the ice coverage, which remained
untouched while gray and dark spotting had been
advancing beneath them. This observation and existence of
DDS-holes may be interpreted so that the development of the
DDSs begins from the bottom of the frosted ice-snow layer.
This may imply that the melting/evaporation process “eats
up” the frosted layer from the bottom where the DDS centers
develop, which become the dark holes of the DDSs.

The bulk radial symmetry, the flowing (seepage) patterns
and the defrosting beginning from bottom of DDSs suggested
us a biological interpretation of the all DDS phenomena.
Therefore we proposed that for interpreting these complex
seasonal phenomena the sublimation processes should
be combined with some kind of biological activity [1, 2].
Under Martian circumstances the only possible solvent is
liquid water with some salt component.

We interpreted the sequence of DDS formation and
changes as a biomarker [8]. If Martian Surface Organisms
(MSOs) exist, they could dwell below the surface ice, which
is heated up by their absorption of sunlight. Later they grow
and reproduce through photosynthesis and they can generate
their own living conditions. Not only liquid water, but even
water vapor can sustain this form of life. Water vapor can
migrate in the soil below the CO2 frost cover supporting the
life conditions for endolithic type communities and this activity
enhances the defrosting/melting process on the top of
the dark dune surface

www.lpi.usra.edu...

Makes for more sense as a honest investigation of the phenomenon in question.

So...if they are trees...why are they cooler than the surroundings? And vanish a few month later?

Because they are not trees since it is too cold? The 'trees' are to be found in the warmer areas...

Well...they say 33% of 250 science exprets belive that life have existed on Mars and 25% belive that still is...wich leaves another 75% which is the majority...so why am I becoming a minority?

75% believed that conditions existed in the past and 25% believe that it still does and it's the best they will risk considering how they well be attacked in popular press for saying anything else. These are people who belong to a community where sticking your neck out can mean almost certain 'death' in scholarly circles so if 25% are willing to say that it is it's as scientifically self evident as the likely hood of the sun rising tomorrow morning. There are no organization, imo, in the world that has smarter and more conservative members than the science establishment of the west.

And further more, what percentage say that "we do not know if there's life or not on Mars?".

Does it matter when the evidence says otherwise? I guess my attempt at trying to show you that there are people to agree with ( you seem to like staying around the middle of the herd) has failed completely so i will just disregard there opinions and continue laying out the very nearly unequivocal evidence.

If I say that I don't know if there's life on Mars means just that, it doesn't mean that I say it isn't.

It means you do not want to know as a serious investigation of the topic would have revealed that there is very little in the form of scientific argument against it. EVERYTHING we know about life on earth suggest life on Mars and we in fact have to make life on Mars far less robust and weird to be able to seriously question it's existence there at this very moment.

Stellar

Originally posted by Darkmind
Actually it doesn't. For it to be red all the time when observed, that would mean constant dust storms, all the time, all over the planet.

Well it's not been 'red' all the time...

If the Martian atmosphere were to be completely cleansed of dust, the daytime sky would appear blue, just as our own sky, because of Rayleigh scattering by the molecules (primarily carbon dioxide molecules) which make up the atmosphere. Pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 1990s suggested that the Martian atmosphere had much less dust loading than in the Viking years. So perhaps the Martian sky was closer to blue than in the Viking years(or perhaps the Hubble Space Telescope was inaccurate on this matter until repairs were completed in February 1997). However, Mars Pathfinder pictures in 1997 showed essentially the same sky color and dust loading as the Viking landers in 1976.

calspace.ucsd.edu...

The first color image (12A006/001) of the surface of Mars was taken July 21, 1976, at the Viking 1 site, one day after the landing. Immediately displayed on color monitors at JPL, as seen in Figure 1a, the landscape awed observers with its resemblance to that of Arizona. Typical desert colorations of soil and rock, ranging from umber sand to yellowish-brown and olivine-colored rocks stood out clearly under a blue sky. Two hours later, however, the official image was changed to the monotone of orange-red (NASA P-17164), Figure 1b, that, with few exceptions, has prevailed in NASA-published images of Mars ever since, as presented by Mutch et al.[1]. However, a spectral analysis of color images of the Viking 1 site reported[2] a broader palate. The paper made the first, and perhaps only, reported use of JPL’s Image Processing Laboratory to analyze digitally the red, green and blue color channels of the images taken by the Viking 1 lander camera. In addition to studying the color images, their RGB components were transformed into saturation, hue and intensity components to enhance subtle deviations. When these components were equally amplified to produce an equal average sensitivity over the spectral bandpass, the resulting “radiometric” (closest possible approach in appearance to a human observer) images very closely resembled the first color image (12A006/001). Among the range of colors, the paper reported that some of the rocks exhibited greenish patterns that apparently changed between images taken 301 sols apart. Radiometric images of lichen-bearing terrestrial rocks taken and processed through the same system as were the Viking images showed a close resemblance of the lichen colonies to the greenish patches on the Mars rocks. Inclusion in the analysis of three near-IR channels available on the Martian images enhanced the greenness of the patches that were, to the sensitivity of the method, virtually indistinguishable from the lichen colonies on the terrestrial rocks.

mars.spherix.com...

Frosty white water ice clouds and swirling orange dust storms above a vivid rusty landscape reveal Mars as a dynamic planet in this sharpest view ever obtained by an Earth-based telescope. The Earth-orbiting Hubble telescope snapped this picture on June 26, when Mars was approximately 43 million miles (68 million km) from Earth -- its closest approach to our planet since 1988. Hubble can see details as small as 10 miles (16 km) across. Especially striking is the large amount of seasonal dust storm activity seen in this image. One large storm system is churning high above the northern polar cap [top of image], and a smaller dust storm cloud can be seen nearby. Another large duststorm is spilling out of the giant Hellas impact basin in the Southern Hemisphere [lower right].

hubblesite.org...

And there are some picture evidence for those who do not like reading when it might upset their 'views'.

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

The so called 'red planet' in all it's gloriuos ( mostly hidden) detail.

Here is Hoaglands extensive exposure of the 'red planet' lie.

www.enterprisemission.com...

That's impossible. It's also very bad for any plants on the planet, which would have a hard time living.

Considering the supposed low pressure the dust loading would be very low and would not approach anything like the sun blocking dust storms we see on earth. A hard living is what people in fourth world slums do every day and plants have it comparatively easy on both earth and mars. Do some reading on what even large scale biological entities can survive before bothering to comment on what Mars life might or might not be able to do.

www.marsanomalyresearch.com...

If you ask me it looks like their doing just fine so what are lying NASA keeping from us that results on a apparently thriving ecology on Mars?

I'm not saying that life never started on Mars -

Well saying so would be rather profoundly ignorant as we know that the Methane in the Martian atmosphere comes from either present life or volcanism exposing ancient life.

The existence of the methane has been largely settled by a set of detailed, high-resolution spectral observations from the 8-metre Gemini telescope, recorded by Mumma's team. They clearly identified two separate methane lines, making a much firmer case than their previous single-line detections, and similar findings of two other groups.

"It's real," say Stephen Squyres, science team leader for NASA's twin Mars rovers. The important thing now, he told New Scientist, is to figure out where it's coming from and where it's going.”

Adding to the intrigue are new calculations by Atreya showing that dust devils and storms on Mars - known to be frequent and intense - must be producing vast quantities of hydrogen peroxide. This highly reactive oxidant was inferred to exist on Mars after the 1976 Viking experiments, but not actually detected until 2003.

All this oxidant must be destroying the methane at a very high rate, Atreya said on Friday. That could explain Mars’s uneven distribution of methane - observed by Mumma’s team and others - as the storms are local and temporary.

But it also implies that methane is being produced at a much higher rate than its present concentration would suggest. If so, cometary or volcanic sources become even more unlikely, and the prospect of a living source becomes slightly more plausible.

www.newscientist.com...

Because researchers believe that methane can persist in the Martian atmosphere for less than 300 years, any methane they find can be assumed to arise from recent biological processes, produced, for example, by methane-producing bacteria. This close link gives methne its less scientific name of swamp gas.

The European Mars Express mission is capable of detecting methane in the martian atmosphere. As Agustin Chicarro, Mars Express Project Scientist said, these "investigations will provide clues as to why the north of the planet is so smooth and the south so rugged, how the Tharsis and Elysium mounds were lifted up and whether active volcanoes exist on Mars today."

www.spacedaily.com...

At the same meeting, NASA's Planetary Protection Officer, John Rummel, described the alternative explanations: "methane in the atmosphere...is a detection from the planetary Fourier spectrometer. ESA, the European Space Agency, has put out an announcement that it's been detected at 10 to 20 parts per billion. Well, methane in the atmosphere on Mars can mean one of three things: either vulcanism, possibly microbial life, or maybe cows. We haven't seen the cows yet. I doubt that we'll find them. But one of the other two would be a very interesting thing to find out."

www.astrobio.net...

there's more than enough evidence of running water in the past,

Far more than enough.

and a thicker atmosphere.

Assuming you really need it for flowing water.

It's just that Mars is... well a bit of an armpit now, too cold, too dry and too dead for life to exist on the surface right now.

Is mostly what you would hear if you do not do your own research.

Evidence for Recent Groundwater Seepage and Surface Runoff on Mars

And if his saying that there are probably oceans considering just how maniacle conservative he tends to be.

www.marsanomalyresearch.com...

The evidence is not only there in scientific terms ( it takes me a great deal of time just to copy paste from my large and growing files) but also in pictures so first look at the the pictures and then , if you can still somehow question the reality, look for the specific scientific confirmation which you will readily find if you follow the scientific 'debates' on every given issue. It's all there had you really some interest in discovering 'the truth'.

Stellar

Originally posted by StellarX
www.space.com...
02.jpg&cap=Odd%20looking%20structures%20on%20Mars%20look%20like%20Banyan
%20trees%20explains%20noted%20writer,%20Arthur%20Clarke

this link didn't work on my browser.

www.msss.com...

about this image I already posted something

something like this but a larger scale

about the interview with Arthur C Clarke

Arthur Clarke is known for spinning elaborate, visionary tales of futures that might be, none more famous than 2001: A Space Odyssey
www.space.com...

This doesn't make him a specialist. You found another one who believes like you, but that's not a proof of martian life.

And then for a vast amount of information ...
www.marsanomalyresearch.com...

So you linked me to the MarsAnomalyResearch site, I think we alreadeay have had discuss that:

Well, give me some links so I can see what you are referring at. But please, not from sites like marsanomalyresearch, but some of scientific background.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Makes for more sense as a honest investigation of the phenomenon in question.

Well, you're wright about honest investigation, but:

...The most important new observation is that the DDSs are crater-like holes in the frosted layer...The existence of the DDS-holes in the frosted layer is important evidence that the process of DDS formation begins from the bottom...
www.lpi.usra.edu...

I find it interesting that although DDS are crater-like holes their formation begin from the bottom. As I remember, a crater like hole is wider at the top and smaller at the bottom. If the formation process starts from the bottom would imply that the bottom diameter would be bigger than that at the top and the formation would be something like a broken-roof dome.
Further more

...Later they grow and reproduce through photosynthesis and they can generate their own living conditions....
same source as above

As I can recall, cell reproduction happens through cellular division (basicly) and photosynthesis has nothing to do with that. This is pure speculation.

Because they are not trees since it is too cold? The 'trees' are to be found in the warmer areas...

Where are this areas? This thread started from a picture portraing the so called trees. As I remeber, even you said something about trees

When we have photo's of things that looks like trees

75% believed that conditions existed in the past

sorry about that, I misinterpreted thouse three quarters and thought after that about thirds. But like I said, if 25% think there is still life on Mars that doesn't make me a minority. If I say I don't know if there's life on Mars it doesn't mean that I say there was no life on Mars.

Does it matter when the evidence says otherwise?

You know, there's also evidence saying there is no life.

you seem to like staying around the middle of the herd

Does this bother you? I mean, I'm not a expert in exobiology so I can't say there's life on Mars without showing a proof that everybody (not 25% but 100%) would agree with. Isn't this fair enough?
(nest post)

Originally posted by apc
Heat is infrared, not UV. Without a thick atmosphere to hold the reflected infrared, Mars radiates it back out into space and does not warm up the planet. If Mars were closer to the Sun, it could get a little warmer.

According to them the atmosphere is that thin but they seem to be lying about a great many things that are quite harder to hide so why really knows how high or low the pressure is?

NASA does not "alter" the photos in the way being implied (see cmdrkeenkid's reference).

Do some research and stop letting others ( who clearly like defending the established faith) do your thinking for you. NASA at the VERY least openly admit that what we see is not how it really looks. They basically suggest that we should just trust them in coming up with the 'best' picture possible. I for one demand more and here is some of what i have found

Most of the red Mars images resulted from using filters out of the range of human vision. Even recent rover panoramas and close-ups labeled “approximate true color” are made with infrared filters standing in for red. Olivier de Goursac, an imaging technician on the Viking Lander mission, argues that the glut of phony colors is easily avoidable. “NASA’s rovers have the capability for true-color imaging with the left camera eye, but they simply choose to use the L2 filter [infrared] as their red and the L7 filter [near-ultraviolet] for their blue,” he says. “They do this because they want to maximize the data stream by sending back to Earth images that can be readily used for stereo imaging with the widest possible range in the spectrum.”

www.discover.com...

Levin, a physicist now at Lockheed Martin in Phoenix, knew exactly how to tell if something was amiss. Two years earlier he had written a paper titled “Solving the Color-Calibration Problem of Martian Lander Images.” Like earlier Mars landers, each rover carries a color- calibration target—a set of primary-color squares used as a reference for its cameras. If the settings are correct the, squares seen through the rover’s cameras look about the same as matching squares on Earth. Levin tracked down Mars images that included a view of the colored squares, and what he saw confirmed his fears: “When the color-calibration target is in the same scene as the Martian surface and sky, it looks completely different. The blue panel is red. It’s as if NASA color-coded blue to be red, and green as a mustard-brown color.” The results dramatically transform Mars from an ocher planet to a red one.

The myth of a red Mars should have died in 1998, when the Pathfinder imaging team finished analyzing 17,050 images from the mission. The researchers conclusively showed that the predominant colors of Mars are yellowish brown, with only subtle variations. Subsequent “true color” images of Mars from Hubble duly show a yellow-brown planet. More recently, images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter in January and February of 2004 present Mars as a world awash in browns, blues, golds, even olives—hence Ron Levin’s surprise and dismay at seeing the garish old red Mars resurface in the cutting-edge pictures from Spirit and Opportunity

www.discover.com...

www.goroadachi.com... for if you want some more depth...

If there is vegetation on the surface, it is colored red and can withstand extreme cold and survive without liquid water.

Why coloured red? Why does it have to do more than what we consider 'normal' on earth? What about the things we can not even begin to imagine?

Conclusion and biological interpretation of DDSs: We
found that the circular shape of DDSs is independent from
local small-scale topographic variation. Fig. 4 shows surface
pattern of grooves on the top of the ice coverage, which remained
untouched while gray and dark spotting had been
advancing beneath them. This observation and existence of
DDS-holes may be interpreted so that the development of the
DDSs begins from the bottom of the frosted ice-snow layer.
This may imply that the melting/evaporation process “eats
up” the frosted layer from the bottom where the DDS centers
develop, which become the dark holes of the DDSs.

The bulk radial symmetry, the flowing (seepage) patterns
and the defrosting beginning from bottom of DDSs suggested
us a biological interpretation of the all DDS phenomena.
Therefore we proposed that for interpreting these complex
seasonal phenomena the sublimation processes should
be combined with some kind of biological activity [1, 2].
Under Martian circumstances the only possible solvent is
liquid water with some salt component.

We interpreted the sequence of DDS formation and
changes as a biomarker [8]. If Martian Surface Organisms
(MSOs) exist, they could dwell below the surface ice, which
is heated up by their absorption of sunlight. Later they grow
and reproduce through photosynthesis and they can generate
their own living conditions. Not only liquid water, but even
water vapor can sustain this form of life. Water vapor can
migrate in the soil below the CO2 frost cover supporting the
life conditions for endolithic type communities and this activity
enhances the defrosting/melting process on the top of
the dark dune surface

www.lpi.usra.edu...

No liquid water? Since when?

Even on the present-day cold and dusty surface of Mars, liquid water may be sustaining a world of Martian microbes.

Data churned out by NASA's Mars Odyssey suggests that the nearby planet is waterfront property -- at least in the form of below surface deposits of water ice. Odyssey scientists report that the soil very close to the surface over much of the planet contains large amounts of ice.

www.space.com...

It has already been established from Viking photographs that a thin frost does form overnight on certain areas of the martian surface. Unlike many scientists, the Levins believe that this frosty layer does not instantly revert back into water vapor when the Sun rises. They suggest that, in the early hours of the martian morning, the atmosphere more than one meter above the martian surface remains too cold to hold water vapor. So the moisture stays on the ground.

Data from the Mars Pathfinder support this theory, as the Pathfinder temperature readings noted that temperatures one meter above the surface were often dozens of degrees colder than the temperatures closer to the ground.

This layer of cold air, say the Levins, provides a form of insulation, trapping the water moisture below. Since the atmosphere is too cold to hold the water as vapor and the ground is warm enough to melt the ice, the water melts into a liquid. This liquid water, the Levins believe, remains on the surface until the temperature of the atmosphere rises enough to allow the water to evaporate. In this way, they argue, the martian soil becomes briefly saturated with liquid water every day.

"The meteorological data fully confirm the presence of liquid water in the topsoil each morning," says Gilbert Levin. "The black-and-white as well as the color images show slick areas that may well be moist patches."

sse.jpl.nasa.gov...

The underground iceberg is just 2 million to 5 million years old -- recent in geologic terms. It formed when early hominids were roaming Earth.

The feature suggests that "vast flooding events, which are known to have occurred from beneath Mars’ surface throughout its geological history, still happen," the Muller, Murray and their colleagues write. "The presence of liquid water for thousands of millions of years, even beneath the surface, is a possible habitat in which primitive life may have developed, and might still be surviving now. Clearly this must now be considered as a prime site for future missions looking for life."

The researchers propose that the ice has been protected from sublimation by an overlying layer of volcanic ash.

www.space.com...

Now that's boring only 'interpretation' of what they can not avoid knowing and here is why you need not know any of that.

www.marsanomalyresearch.com...

The sky is not blue.

Could as well deny the Earth's sky is blue and that it never changes colour depending on perspective.

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

There is nothing green.

"Note the green colouring is an effect of image processing" Which was not added until a few months later after massive protest from one and all. One wonders why they refuse to just correct it to something more 'suitable' then?

sci.esa.int...

And no comment from them on the next one ( published on same date)

sci.esa.int...

"Image created by ESA Science from data contained in the Mars Express public archive. The selected colour scheme is an interpretation based on the original raw data."

sci.esa.int...

So after two years they still come up with green but now say it's an 'interpretation'? Clearly NASA scientist are far far better at their job cause they VERY rarely come up with green in their pictures. Stupid Europeans?

The question is thus not if NASA is lying about the colours ( they are) but which colours they are hiding from us.

Stellar

EVERYTHING we know about life on earth suggest life on Mars

There's not a proof that life exists wright now on Mars. That's not even a proof at all, it's a speculation.

Originally posted by Darkmind
Slight problem. If NASA has been doctoring the pictures to change the colour of Mars, then why has Mars always been known (since ancient times) as the Red Planet?

Well it's not been 'red' all the time...

If the Martian atmosphere were to be completely cleansed of dust, the daytime sky would appear blue, ...

I agree with that, the martian sky would be blue in some occasions, but the whole planet is pretty much dark red (or maybe brown). That's why back here on Earth we see Mars to appear red for the naked eye (since ancient times). And you can see clearly that from all the links you provided.

About those martian gullies

www.sciencemag.org...

There is an alternative explanation for that, you know.

while alternative explanations suggest the erosion was produced by a flowing jumble of solid and gaseous carbon dioxide
apod.gsfc.nasa.gov...

www.marsanomalyresearch.com... -directory.htm

And here's again a link to MarsAnomalyResearch....

Originally posted by StellarX
According to them the atmosphere is that thin but they seem to be lying about a great many things that are quite harder to hide so why really knows how high or low the pressure is?

That's funny. You trust Gilbert Levin and Joseph Miller who worked with the viking data and yet they didn't found anything wrong with the surface pressure mesurements....
look at this post
www.abovetopsecret.com...

About the true color on Mars....there's a big, big, big thread about that, you should see it
www.abovetopsecret.com...
But that was already posted

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid
Possibly the greatest possible thread on this topic can be found here: EXCLUSIVE: NASA Is Not Altering Mars Colors.

No liquid water? Since when?

Your external source says it's underground water..well, below surface deposits of water ice....So...How can it be that there is green vegetation on the surface? Do these plants have roots that pierce the underground ice deposits to rich to the liquid water?

"The meteorological data fully confirm the presence of liquid water in the topsoil each morning," says Gilbert Levin

And Gilbert Levin says that this is the missing link for the LR experiment to be interpreted as an evidence of life. I've read his article and perhaps his wright...but this leaves only maybe a few hours of traces of liquid water on the surface, not enough to creat a gullie. And the circadian rhythm from the LR experiment, to be a proof of life, would have to be in strong correlation with the liquid water pressence on the surface. But since Gilbert Levin does not present such an evidence, I will remain skeptic.

"Note the green colouring is an effect of image processing" Which was not added until a few months later after massive protest from one and all. One wonders why they refuse to just correct it to something more 'suitable' then?

Your source for that is?

Oh, my god, oh my god!!!!
They have found proof that there's life out there and on a big scale!!! And the solution to the famine!!!!!

Giant potato found in space

Using MarsAnomalyResearch reasoning...if it looks like a potato...then sure is a potato!!!!

Hey Apass, it even has the spuds carved out of it already!

Originally posted by Apass
It means the ice is transforming in vapor thru sublimation since the present day climat on Mars can not sustain water in liquid form due to the low pressure and temperature and according to the triple point of water

Actually we not only know that liquid water can exist on the surface based on our scientific understanding :

And if these vexing problems weren't enough, recent images from MOC reveal a startling new puzzle. In nearly a dozen different locations on Mars - all of them far from the equator - there are signs that water has been seeping out of the walls of valleys and craters, forming small gullies. Some scientists speculate that this activity is very recent, perhaps occurring within the past 10 years; others say 10 million years is more likely.

Yet many aspects of these seepage gullies defy common sense. "They sure look like water-worn features," says Mike Carr, "but they seem to contradict what we know about the stability of water." They occur not only in the coldest regions on Mars, but on slopes facing away from the Sun, where the temperature rarely gets above minus 50 degrees Centigrade. Yet the water appears to be seeping out from only 100 meters below the surface, a depth at which scientists previously believed Mars's crust to be frozen solid. Scientists are busily working to devise an explanation for this phenomenon.

science.nasa.gov...

A team of researchers from the University of Arkansas has measured water evaporation rates under Mars-like conditions, and their findings favor the presence of surface water on the planet. Water on the planet's surface makes the existence of past or present life on Mars a little more likely, according to the group.

Derek Sears, director of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, and his colleagues graduate student Shauntae Moore and technician Mikhail Kareev reported their initial findings at the fall 2003 meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the AAS.

The researchers have brought on-line a large planetary environmental chamber in which temperature, pressure, atmosphere, sunlight and soil conditions can be reproduced. Sears and his colleagues use the chamber to investigate the persistence of water under a range of physical environments and to study its evaporation.

"These findings suggest that even under worst case scenarios, where wind is maximizing evaporation, evaporation rates on Mars are quite low," Sears said. This implies that surface water could indeed exist, or have existed recently, under the given conditions on Mars.

www.spaceref.com...

"We have conditions on Mars that seem to forbid liquid water very close to the surface," said Michael Carr of the USGS at the June 22, 2000, NASA press conference. "At high latitudes [where the gullies are located], the temperatures are 70 to 100 degrees centigrade below freezing. It's incredibly cold. We expect the ground to be frozen 3 to 6 km deep."

"First of all, you have to remember that the average atmospheric pressure on Mars is very close to the triple point of water," explains Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "You only have to increase the pressure a little bit to make liquid water possible."

"That's the average," says Haberle, "so some places will have pressures that are higher than 6.1 millibars and others will be lower. If we look at sites on Mars where the pressure is a bit higher, that's where water can theoretically exist as a liquid."

"There are 5 five distinct regions where we might sometimes find surface water: in the Amazonis, Chryse and Elysium Planitia, in the Hellas Basin and the Argyre Basin. Together they comprise about 30% of the planet's surface. That's not to say that liquid water really does exist in those places, just that it could."

science.nasa.gov...

Data from the Mars Pathfinder support this theory, as the Pathfinder temperature readings noted that temperatures one meter above the surface were often dozens of degrees colder than the temperatures closer to the ground.

This layer of cold air, say the Levins, provides a form of insulation, trapping the water moisture below. Since the atmosphere is too cold to hold the water as vapor and the ground is warm enough to melt the ice, the water melts into a liquid. This liquid water, the Levins believe, remains on the surface until the temperature of the atmosphere rises enough to allow the water to evaporate. In this way, they argue, the martian soil becomes briefly saturated with liquid water every day.

"The meteorological data fully confirm the presence of liquid water in the topsoil each morning," says Gilbert Levin. "The black-and-white as well as the color images show slick areas that may well be moist patches."

sse.jpl.nasa.gov...

WASHINGTON -- Researchers using NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft announced Thursday that they found puzzling signs of water seeping into what appear to be young, freshly-cut gullies and gaps in the Martian surface.
The startling discovery of recently-formed, weeping layers of rock and sediment has planetary experts scratching their heads.

The wet spots show up in more than 120 locations on Mars and in the coldest places on the planet, said Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, which built the spacecraft's camera.

And that presents a "perplexing problem," he said, because logic says that Mars sub-zero temperatures and thin atmosphere should have kept those wet spots from ever forming.

The wet spots, which turn up in 200 to 250 different images from the Global Surveyor spacecraft, "could be a few million years old but we cannot rule out that some of them are so recent as to have formed yesterday," Malin said.

www.space.com...

but we have photographic evidence that it does.

qt.exploratorium.edu...

www.msss.com...

www.msss.com...

www.msss.com...

www.msss.com...

And then is a great deal of picture evidence on the MarsAnomalyResearch page where you apparently refuse to go due to the overwhelming nature of the evidence. If one can not disprove just ignore and flat out deny the existence of it.

Originally posted by Apass
Well...-15 degrees that's during the day.

Actually

The current martian atmosphere is 99% thinner than the Earth's. The surface temperature averages -64 F (-53 C), but varies between 200 below zero during polar nights to 80 F (27 C) at midday peaks near the equator. The global picture of Mars is sometimes compared terrestrially to Antarctic dry regions, only colder.

www.spacedaily.com...

and

I chose the Matanuska Glacier to visit because it's accessible and has dark rock in contact with ice," says Hoover. "The sun shining on the rock causes the ice to melt. There are pools of liquid water where microorganisms grow in abundance. There is something very interesting and exciting about this picture of me taking samples from the edge of a moulin (a water-carved crevasse). Most of what we see is ice and the air temperature is below freezing, yet there is liquid water pouring out of the glacier. How is that possible? The water had broken free further back up the glacier where sunlit rocks melted the ice. Then it flowed beneath the ice until it broke through a hole in the wall of the ice. Everything the liquid water came in contact with was freezing, yet the moving water did not freeze.

"I have also seen liquid water running from snow melting on dark rocks heated by sunlight in Antarctica, even though the air temperature was below -20 °C."

There are many places on Earth where liquid water and ice co-exist in sub-zero conditions, says Hoover. The most famous example is Lake Vostok, an expanse of water roughly the size of lake Ontario lying 4 km beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet acts as a blanket, shielding the lake from Mars-like temperatures at the surface.

Will explorers one day discover oases like Lake Vostok beneath icy terrain on Mars? No one knows. But instead of "Follow the Water," the mantra of future colonists on the red planet might well be "Follow the Salt."

science.nasa.gov...

So lets not imagine that relatively low temperature can freeze water if there is motion of any strenght.

Originally posted by Apass
I knew it was a mistake sneaking around here but I just couldn't put my finger on till last night.

Only last night?

[ex]And since Mars atmosphere contains only traces of water vapor the vapor pressure is well below those 6 mbars of the triple point of water. So you can't find liquid water on the surface of Mars (maybe underground, but that's a different story).

Not really so. Mars has significant enough water vapour to have 'thick' clouds along the equator and other areas.

Continued

What is clear is that clouds hover over the caps as the weather starts to warm in the martian spring in the northern and southern hemisphere.
Orbiter data shows that those thin clouds vanish as the sun rises, and that the material falls back to Mars as frost or snow.
"This is clearly evidence that it snows on Mars," Smith said.

It's a far cry from the dry and dead world imagined by previous generations.
"The Mars we thought we knew was not the real Mars," says Ken Edgett, a geologist with Malin Space Science Systems of San Diego, California, which built the orbiter's cameras. "I'm personally surprised."

www.space.com...

This image, captured in April 1999, shows an early-afternoon scene of a volcano called Apollinaris Patera. The volcano is located near the martian equator, and is thought to be nearly three miles high. The volcanos caldera, the circular pit featured at its summit, is about 50 miles across. The white you see is a patch of white clouds hanging over the volcano.

www.space.com...

This picture shows a portion of the floor of Melas Chasma in Valles Marineris. Dark sand dunes in the image are spaced about 190 feet apart. Smaller ripples are also visible in the troughs between some of the dunes, perhaps indicating a current windy environment.

his image features typical afternoon clouds over each of the large Tharsis volcanoes, or "montes." Olympus Mons is in the upper left corner, with the three Tharsis volcanoes running diagonally from upper center to lower left. Theyre called in order Ascraeus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons. Together, the Tharsis Montes cover an area that would stretch down the entire west coast of the United States.

This wide-angle camera view of Mars was snapped in late July 1999, about a week before the start of the planets southern spring. At this time, wintertime frost was slowly melting. A slew of dust storm clouds (grayish-orange) occur just above the southern polar cap at the lower left.

www.space.com...

Mars is often depicted as a dusty place, and it is. But it can be cloudy on the red planet, too. And Martian clouds are sometimes more like terrestrial clouds than you might think.

In this photo, taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and released earlier this month, clouds surround several of Mars' towering volcanoes. One of them, Olympus Mons, soars 15 miles (24 kilometers) above the surface. What are the clouds made of? Water ice, say scientists at Malin Space Science Systems, which operates the spacecraft's camera.

www.space.com...

Opportunity, back on the Meridiani Planum, took pictures of wispy clouds that look strikingly like cirrus clouds on Earth.

"This is just a totally spectacular image," said NASA rover scientist Michael Wolff as he presented the first image. And upon unveiling the second: "I can't get enough of these."

Wolff said the clouds are almost surely made of water ice. They've been spotted by orbiting spacecraft before and are known to occur near the equator -- where the rovers are -- only when Mars is at aphelion, or at its farthest point from the Sun on its elliptical orbit. During aphelion, about 40 percent less sunlight warms the planet, changing the climate,

www.space.com...

Now consider Levins earlier remarks about saturation levels that will prevent evaporation:

It has already been established from Viking photographs that a thin frost does form overnight on certain areas of the martian surface. Unlike many scientists, the Levins believe that this frosty layer does not instantly revert back into water vapor when the Sun rises. They suggest that, in the early hours of the martian morning, the atmosphere more than one meter above the martian surface remains too cold to hold water vapor. So the moisture stays on the ground.

Data from the Mars Pathfinder support this theory, as the Pathfinder temperature readings noted that temperatures one meter above the surface were often dozens of degrees colder than the temperatures closer to the ground.

This layer of cold air, say the Levins, provides a form of insulation, trapping the water moisture below. Since the atmosphere is too cold to hold the water as vapor and the ground is warm enough to melt the ice, the water melts into a liquid. This liquid water, the Levins believe, remains on the surface until the temperature of the atmosphere rises enough to allow the water to evaporate. In this way, they argue, the martian soil becomes briefly saturated with liquid water every day.

"The meteorological data fully confirm the presence of liquid water in the topsoil each morning," says Gilbert Levin. "The black-and-white as well as the color images show slick areas that may well be moist patches."

sse.jpl.nasa.gov...

Now lets consider what we might learn from the fact that we have clouds in abundance by looking at them from another perspective:

On Earth, the condensing substance is water vapor, which forms small droplets of water (typically 0.01 mm of ice crystals) that, when surrounded with billions of other droplets or crystals, are visible as clouds. Dense deep clouds exhibit a high reflectance (70 to 95%) throughout the visible range of wavelengths: they thus appear white, at least from the top. Cloud droplets tend to scatter light very efficiently, so that the intensity of the solar radiation decreases with depth into the cloud, hence the grey or even sometimes dark appearance of the clouds at their base.

en.wikipedia.org...

So basically if we see white cloud tops it means we have a pretty dense cloud formation with substantial amounts of water.

Now look at these images of Mars and tell me how white those cloud tops are?

Unlike the Earth, where clouds are found around the entire globe, on Mars, clouds seem only to be found near the equator, as shown in this Hubble telescope image. This may be because water of Mars may only exist at equatorial regions.

As early as 1796 scientists were reporting "yellow", and "white" or "bluish" clouds in the Martian atmosphere. With data from the Mariner 9 mission, scientists could finally prove that the clouds were made of water. Mars Global Surveyor is providing more proof of the existence of water clouds.

More study is needed to understand just how the clouds come and go in the Martian atmosphere. For example, even though clouds have been found, there is no proof it actually rains on Mars! Precipitation of water depends upon how cold it is. The temperatures in the atmosphere may be too cold for water to fall to the ground as droplets.

www.windows.ucar.edu...=/mars/atmosphere/martian_clouds.html&edu=elem

It is early summer in the northern hemisphere, and the North polar cap has retreated to about 80 degrees N latitude; the "residual" summer cap, which is composed of water ice, is about one-third the size of the "seasonal" winter cap, which consists mostly of carbon-dioxide frost (dry ice) condensed on the surface. The polar cap is surrounded by a "sand sea" made up of dark sand dunes. A distinct belt of water-ice clouds extends over much of this hemisphere.

hubblesite.org...

How dense is the atmosphere at surface level really?

The new high-altitude cloud layer has implications for landing on Mars as it suggests the upper layers of Mars' atmosphere can be denser than previously thought. This will be an important piece of information for future missions, when using friction in the outer atmosphere to slow down spacecraft (in a technique called 'aerobraking'), either for landing or going into orbit around the planet.

These results are published online in the Icarus scientific magazine (vol. 183, issue 2, August 2006), in the article titled: "Subvisible CO2 ice clouds detected in the mesosphere of Mars", by F.Montmessin, J.L.Bertaux (Service d'Aeronomie du CNRS, Verrières-le-Buisson, France ), et al.

Source: ESA

www.physorg.com...

Makes you wonder when these problems still remains.

So StellarX, where's the mud at Sprit's landing site?
Further more, if there's mud at Spirit landing site, than this also is mud:

Evidence for Recent
Groundwater Seepage and
Surface Runoff on Mars
Michael C. Malin* and Kenneth S. Edgett
Relatively young landforms on Mars, seen in high-resolution images acquired
by the Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera since March 1999, suggest
the presence of sources of liquid water at shallow depths beneath the martian
surface. Found at middle and high martian latitudes ( particularly in the southern
hemisphere), gullies within the walls of a very small number of impact
craters, south polar pits, and two of the larger martian valleys display geomorphic
features that can be explained by processes associated with groundwater
seepage and surface runoff. The relative youth of the landforms is
indicated by the superposition of the gullies on otherwise geologically young
surfaces and by the absence of superimposed landforms or cross-cutting features,
including impact craters, small polygons, and eolian dunes. The limited
size and geographic distribution of the features argue for constrained source
reservoirs.

www.sciencemag.org...

Continued

WASHINGTON -- Researchers using NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft announced Thursday that they found puzzling signs of water seeping into what appear to be young, freshly-cut gullies and gaps in the Martian surface.
The startling discovery of recently-formed, weeping layers of rock and sediment has planetary experts scratching their heads.

The wet spots show up in more than 120 locations on Mars and in the coldest places on the planet, said Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, which built the spacecraft's camera.

And that presents a "perplexing problem," he said, because logic says that Mars sub-zero temperatures and thin atmosphere should have kept those wet spots from ever forming.

The wet spots, which turn up in 200 to 250 different images from the Global Surveyor spacecraft, "could be a few million years old but we cannot rule out that some of them are so recent as to have formed yesterday," Malin said.

www.space.com...

The findings announced Thursday -- evidence of water seeping to Mars' surface in recently cut gullies -- bridge a gap in the beliefs of astrobiologists, taking them from strong suspicion to near certainty about the existence of liquid water on Mars.

"There's a subtlety between having every reason to believe [water] is there and having this higher level of certainty," said Bruce Jakosky, a professor of geological science at the University of Colorado, and the director of the university's center for astrobiology.

"We now know pretty convincingly that there is liquid water on Mars, and that it's relatively accessible near the surface," he said.

The field of space studies is known to throw curveballs. For instance, scientists last week said the latest evidence of water was found in cooler and darker areas facing away from the equator, while many had previously assumed that liquid water near the surface could only exist in hotter, sun-facing areas.

The discovery of evidence of liquid water on Mars boosts astrobiology.

Wet spots near on on the surface is now very much admitted to and expected so....

It is still too early to say for sure if rocks have weathering rind from the Martian wind, he said. But, he noted, "We may not have to struggle to look at these rocks because Mars may have cleared them off for us."

Squyres described as "bizarre, really weird" the way in which the crater floor seems to have responded to the dragging of the rover's airbags, which deflated after the lander bounced down onto the surface after being released from its parachute. "I don't understand it," he said. Surface pebbles seem to have been squished into the soil around the lander, which appears like layers of cohesive material. "It looks like mud, but can't be mud. It looks like when it is scrunched, it folds up," said Squyres, who added, "This is something I have never seen before."

www.news.cornell.edu...

Scientists were also surprised by how little the soil was disturbed when Spirit's robotic arm pressed the Moessbauer spectrometer's contact plate directly onto the patch being examined. Microscopic images from before and after that pressing showed almost no change. "I thought it would scrunch down the soil particles," Squyres said. "Nothing collapsed. What is holding these grains together?"

www.sciencedaily.com...

NC (Nathalie Cabrol): We all said that. When we looked at that we said, It's mud-like. But that's just looking at a picture. We still don't know its composition. The thing is that this material seems to be cohesive, to look like mud. It's going to be very interesting to find out its composition.

I'm thrilled because when you look at it, you can see a patch that has been removed by the scraping. It has been flipped over, but it's still sticking to the rock. This is probably something we haven't seen anywhere else on Mars, and it's going to be really interesting to look at it more closely.

Is there any moisture in this? We don't know. Is there some salt, and we're seeing particles sticking together? Once again, we're just in awe, and looking at strange things that look like things we know on Earth. It doesn't mean that they are.

www.astrobio.net...

But clearly if you have decided that water can't be involved you have this kind of problem. It's absolutely fascinating to see the scientific mind (in-) action.....

since back here on Earth the trench left by the sampler would look like that in a sandy soil only if the soil was wet.

Which is kind of my point but since it's not yours i am just slightly confused. Whatever is happening on the Moon i am sure we can come up with something more logical than mud since we have very little if any evidence to suggest surface moisture on the moon ( well last i checked).

Stellar

Originally posted by Apass
this link didn't work on my browser.

It was a just a link from the space article the the picture of the trees Arthur 'saw'.
Here are some other one's then

www.msss.com...

www.msss.com...

www.marsanomalyresearch.com...

Plenty more links to official date and what Mr Skipper pointed out from them.

bout this image I already posted something

Nothing worth calling a response ....

something like this but a larger scale

If you actually looked at the data provided you would have noticed that the 'trees' in those pictures were quite large and certainly not related to 'ice crystals'
. It looks very desperate when you do not consider the date and just go rushing off to find something that looks something like it.

This doesn't make him a specialist. You found another one who believes like you, but that's not a proof of martian life.

It may not but it just shows you that he was sure enough to put his name to it even back then. It's sad that you can not see a tree for a tree when it's staring you right in the face!

So you linked me to the MarsAnomalyResearch site, I think we already have had discuss that:

We never discussed it as you refuse to do there and tell me what is actually 'wrong' with the date. What is rather clear here is that the evidence on the site is so completely overwhelming that you must totally disregard it just to keep saying what you want. If you had any shame or decency you would at least point out WHY you do not consider his conclusions ( based on official date with links and all ) correct.

Well, give me some links so I can see what you are referring at. But please, not from sites like marsanomalyresearch, but some of scientific background.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

You have provided absolutely no reasons why you consider his date or conclusions false and until such time you should at least have the decency to respond properly to the data from the other sources i provided. All you have done is suggested that Mr Skipper might somehow be wrong which might obviously be so. Have you considered the fact that you might be wrong considering how little you know in relation to what his so far pur forward on his site?

Well, you're wright about honest investigation, but:
I find it interesting that although DDS are crater-like holes their formation begin from the bottom. As I remember, a crater like hole is wider at the top and smaller at the bottom. If the formation process starts from the bottom would imply that the bottom diameter would be bigger than that at the top and the formation would be something like a broken-roof dome.

Well they make it perfectly clear that it's 'crater like' meaning it's relatively deep and that these are 'holes' in the ice. If you read the entire article you would notice that the heating from below would make sense in that we can clearly see that the dark spots underneath is larger than the holes in the ice above.

Further more
As I can recall, cell reproduction happens through cellular division (basicly) and photosynthesis has nothing to do with that. This is pure speculation.

Photosynthesis (photo=light, synthesis=putting together), generally, is the synthesis of sugar from light, carbon dioxide and water, with oxygen as a by-product. It is arguably the most important biochemical pathway known; nearly all life depends on it. It is an extremely complex process, comprised of many coordinated biochemical reactions. It occurs in higher plants, algae, some bacteria, and some protists, organisms collectively referred to as photoautotrophs. This article summarizes some of the major aspects of the process and provides links to more detailed articles explaining the numerous technical details, and implications, involved.

en.wikipedia.org...

It's a question of using the energy the sun provides so freely so stop trying to attack people dozens of times better informed than yourself when you do not even know what their saying.

Where are this areas? This thread started from a picture portraing the so called trees. As I remeber, even you said something about trees

www.marsanomalyresearch.com...

All the source material he uses ( from NASA sources no less) are there with exactly where the biological activity was spotted.


sorry about that, I misinterpreted thouse three quarters and thought after that about thirds. But like I said, if 25% think there is still life on Mars that doesn't make me a minority. If I say I don't know if there's life on Mars it doesn't mean that I say there was no life on Mars.

So basically you want to sound open minded but you dismiss everything that will force you to make up your mind? It's this very same type of cowardly behaviour that drives the science community to these desperately indecisive claims that simply can not be reached unless one is not desperately afraid of saying something everyone is not already agreeing with.

"There is going to be a howl, even outrage," over these findings, geologist and isotope geochemist Paul Knauth at Arizona State University told LiveScience. They will say hot springs could have swamped the rocks Ohmoto and his colleagues looked at with normal sulfur, or that the crystals they analyzed washed in from elsewhere, or that their measurements are inaccurate, he said. However, Knauth noted Ohmoto and his colleagues did address these points "and make good arguments."

www.livescience.com...

"The life on Mars issue has recently undergone a paradigm shift," said Ian Wright, an astrobiologist at the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute at the Open University in Britain, "to the extent now that one can talk about the possibility of present life on Mars without risking scientific suicide."

wired.com...

He knows it but at least he has a reputation to protect from the ridicule that will result if he said what he honestly believes; what is your excuse for all this denial?

You know, there's also evidence saying there is no life.

Only when you take the little bits in isolation. Why do you insist on throwing away so many pieces of the puzzle just so you can claim that can't make out the picture?

Does this bother you? I mean, I'm not a expert in exobiology so I can't say there's life on Mars without showing a proof that everybody (not 25% but 100%) would agree with. Isn't this fair enough?
(nest post)

Well if you put all the little bits together you will have a very clear picture in front of you but since you insist on considering each in isolation you really are making a conscious choice not to see what can be.

Not since the twin Viking Landers set down on the surface of Mars over 24 years ago, has NASA included a biologist, paleontologist, or ichnologist (study of trace fossils) on any of its missions.

Viking was unique as the first spacecraft to land and search for life on another planet. As such, the Viking program enlisted the talents of three Principal Biology Investigators, a Biology Team Leader and co-experimenters.

Along with this official group were other interested biologists outside the program looking at the data in a peer review process that would lead to the publication of the scientific papers that followed.

www.spacedaily.com...

So if they really wanted to decided the proof why not include the experts who could determine it? It's so clear that they KNOW what is there but just refuse to admit it by excluding anyone from the team who could directly confirm it.

Stellar

[edit on 3-9-2006 by StellarX]

Originally posted by Apass
There's not a proof that life exists wright now on Mars. That's not even a proof at all, it's a speculation.

We have confirmed liquid water on Mars
We have confirmed ammonia on Mars
We have confirmed methane on Mars
We have confirmed formaldehyde on Mars. ( i believe i have provided enough links in my others posts to prove all of that? If not just ask )

Now both formaldehyde and ammonia only last for a few hours in the Martian atmosphere so there must not only be a constant source for both ( methane) but a massive one at that.

Nitrogen is rare in the Martian environment but because no form of terrestrial life can exist without it, the presence of ammonia may indicate that Martian microbial life is hoarding it.

"There are no known ways for ammonia to be present in the Martian atmosphere that do not involve life," the Nasa scientist said.

news.bbc.co.uk...

Not that we need Ammonia to be sure but the fact that it's there makes this a 'far beyond need for doubt' situation as the picture evidence quite clearly illustrates.

I agree with that, the martian sky would be blue in some occasions, but the whole planet is pretty much dark red (or maybe brown). That's why back here on Earth we see Mars to appear red for the naked eye (since ancient times). And you can see clearly that from all the links you provided.

From outer space it's quite clear that there is a blue hue and lots of very specific similarities with the earth viewed from space even with the bright surface.

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

hubblesite.org...

Those should give you a good idea of just how blue it all seems from space but if they do not i can finding something that looks strikingly like Earth minus the massive oceans. I do not believe Mars could look more similar given the absence of the massive water mass we have here and it should in fact probably look far less like Earth.

There is an alternative explanation for that, you know.

while alternative explanations suggest the erosion was produced by a flowing jumble of solid and gaseous carbon dioxide
apod.gsfc.nasa.gov...

And if these vexing problems weren't enough, recent images from MOC reveal a startling new puzzle. In nearly a dozen different locations on Mars - all of them far from the equator - there are signs that water has been seeping out of the walls of valleys and craters, forming small gullies. Some scientists speculate that this activity is very recent, perhaps occurring within the past 10 years; others say 10 million years is more likely.

Yet many aspects of these seepage gullies defy common sense. "They sure look like water-worn features," says Mike Carr, "but they seem to contradict what we know about the stability of water." They occur not only in the coldest regions on Mars, but on slopes facing away from the Sun, where the temperature rarely gets above minus 50 degrees Centigrade. Yet the water appears to be seeping out from only 100 meters below the surface, a depth at which scientists previously believed Mars's crust to be frozen solid. Scientists are busily working to devise an explanation for this phenomenon.

science.nasa.gov...

WASHINGTON -- Researchers using NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft announced Thursday that they found puzzling signs of water seeping into what appear to be young, freshly-cut gullies and gaps in the Martian surface.
The startling discovery of recently-formed, weeping layers of rock and sediment has planetary experts scratching their heads.

The wet spots show up in more than 120 locations on Mars and in the coldest places on the planet, said Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, which built the spacecraft's camera.

And that presents a "perplexing problem," he said, because logic says that Mars sub-zero temperatures and thin atmosphere should have kept those wet spots from ever forming.

The wet spots, which turn up in 200 to 250 different images from the Global Surveyor spacecraft, "could be a few million years old but we cannot rule out that some of them are so recent as to have formed yesterday," Malin said.

www.space.com...

"There's a subtlety between having every reason to believe [water] is there and having this higher level of certainty," said Bruce Jakosky, a professor of geological science at the University of Colorado, and the director of the university's center for astrobiology.

"We now know pretty convincingly that there is liquid water on Mars, and that it's relatively accessible near the surface," he said.

www.space.com...

And here's again a link to MarsAnomalyResearch....

And here it is again till you have the guts and decency to look at something that might upset your hopelessly conservative views.

www.marsanomalyresearch.com...

Originally posted by Apass
That's funny. You trust Gilbert Levin and Joseph Miller who worked with the viking data and yet they didn't found anything wrong with the surface pressure mesurements....
look at this post

Well he has his doubts and it's pretty widely admitted in the rest of the scientific media that the 6.1 is a mean pressure only...

"First of all, you have to remember that the average atmospheric pressure on Mars is very close to the triple point of water," explains Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "You only have to increase the pressure a little bit to make liquid water possible."

"That's the average," says Haberle, "so some places will have pressures that are higher than 6.1 millibars and others will be lower. If we look at sites on Mars where the pressure is a bit higher, that's where water can theoretically exist as a liquid."

"There are 5 five distinct regions where we might sometimes find surface water: in the Amazonis, Chryse and Elysium Planitia, in the Hellas Basin and the Argyre Basin. Together they comprise about 30% of the planet's surface. That's not to say that liquid water really does exist in those places, just that it could."

science.nasa.gov...

About the true color on Mars....there's a big, big, big thread about that, you should see it
www.abovetopsecret.com...
But that was already posted

The thread is filled with garbish that mostly avoids the real data and real evidence that points to obvious and clearly evident tampering by NASA.

Most of the red Mars images resulted from using filters out of the range of human vision. Even recent rover panoramas and close-ups labeled “approximate true color” are made with infrared filters standing in for red. Olivier de Goursac, an imaging technician on the Viking Lander mission, argues that the glut of phony colors is easily avoidable. “NASA’s rovers have the capability for true-color imaging with the left camera eye, but they simply choose to use the L2 filter [infrared] as their red and the L7 filter [near-ultraviolet] for their blue,” he says. “They do this because they want to maximize the data stream by sending back to Earth images that can be readily used for stereo imaging with the widest possible range in the spectrum.”

www.discover.com...

Levin, a physicist now at Lockheed Martin in Phoenix, knew exactly how to tell if something was amiss. Two years earlier he had written a paper titled “Solving the Color-Calibration Problem of Martian Lander Images.” Like earlier Mars landers, each rover carries a color-calibration target—a set of primary-color squares used as a reference for its cameras. If the settings are correct the, squares seen through the rover’s cameras look about the same as matching squares on Earth. Levin tracked down Mars images that included a view of the colored squares, and what he saw confirmed his fears: “When the color-calibration target is in the same scene as the Martian surface and sky, it looks completely different. The blue panel is red. It’s as if NASA color-coded blue to be red, and green as a mustard-brown color.” The results dramatically transform Mars from an ocher planet to a red one.

The myth of a red Mars should have died in 1998, when the Pathfinder imaging team finished analyzing 17,050 images from the mission. The researchers conclusively showed that the predominant colors of Mars are yellowish brown, with only subtle variations. Subsequent “true color” images of Mars from Hubble duly show a yellow-brown planet. More recently, images from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter in January and February of 2004 present Mars as a world awash in browns, blues, golds, even olives—hence Ron Levin’s surprise and dismay at seeing the garish old red Mars resurface in the cutting-edge pictures from Spirit and Opportunity

www.discover.com...

www.goroadachi.com... for if you want some more depth...

Your external source says it's underground water..well, below surface deposits of water ice....So...How can it be that there is green vegetation on the surface? Do these plants have roots that pierce the underground ice deposits to rich to the liquid water?

Continued