Streaks of Water on Mars For decades, the possibility of life on Mars has been a major question left unanswered, but NASA's recent discovery of water on Mars has bought us one step closer towards the answer. Such evidence of the water’s existence in Mars was strongly supported by the new findings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) by allowing researchers to analyze the hydrated minerals located in streaks seen on the planet. These streaks are known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), and researchers realized that the hydrated salts play a role in the appearance of the RSL. Like salt used on the roads during snow storms, hydrated salts lower the freezing point of the liquid brines thus forming a shallow subsurface flow. Furthermore, the darkening of the RSL are caused by water wicking towards the surface. However, the hydrated salts do not obviously appear throughout the seasons of Mars. …show more content…
Ojha indicates that these streaks tend to darken and flow further down during the warm seasons, but fade as the season become cooler. Moreover, Ojha and his co-authors used images from the MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) to document the RSL in different locations on Mars. With the addition of the images from the HiRISE and MRO’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), they were able to mineral map the images in order to observe the few signatures of hydrated salts in the four relatively wide RSL locations. These observed spectral signatures were concluded to be hydrated salts known as perchlorates. This was the first time ever that perchlorates have been discovered in its hydrated form and from the