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New Mars Discoveries

Posted by samzenpus on from the the-land-beneath-the-land dept.

sighted writes "The fleet of five active spacecraft examining Mars (in addition to the recently-missing Mars Global Surveyor) have been working overtime. On the heels of last week's finding of possible flows of liquid water, the ESA has announced that an entire hidden landscape exists just beneath the surface of the Red Planet, and NASA has released some really amazing images of layered topography that will yield many clues to the history of this strange world."

1 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting discovery... by skelly33 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Neat - It makes me wonder how it could have been covered up so well. Letting my imagination run wild... what if Olympus Mons let loose a cataclysmic eruption so powerful that it:

    1) put enough sediment into the atmosphere to cover the entire surface,
    2) put larger rocks into orbit which eventually decayed and came back down to form the rock-strewn surface we are accustomed to seeing, possibly forming some of the ounger crater impact sites, and
    3) blocked out sunlight, killing off any shred of life on the planet at the time of the event

    "How" this could come to pass is the first thing that pops into my mind - no speculation in the article though which I always enjoy hearing from NASA.