PARIS: Scientists announced on Monday “the strongest evidence yet” of liquid water on Mars, raising a distant prospect of microscopic life on our neighbouring planet.

Curious lines running down steep slopes on the surface of the Red Planet may be streaks of super-salty brine, a team said after discovering evidence of “hydrated” salt minerals.

These results “strongly support the hypothesis” of liquid water on Mars — though not H2O as we know it, concluded a research paper in the journal Nature Geoscience.

If anything, it was likely “wet soil, not free water sitting on the surface”, study co-author Alfred McEwen, from the University of Arizona, said.

NASA said the findings, made with its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, “provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars”.

“Mars is not the dry, arid planet we thought of in the past, according to Jim Green, the American agency’s planetary science director.

“Under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars,” he told journalists in Washington.

The hydrated salt minerals, called perchlorites, contain water molecules in their make-up, and their presence indicates that “water plays a vital role in the formation of these streaks”, according to Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

It is widely accepted that the Red Planet once hosted plentiful water in liquid form, and still has water today, albeit frozen in ice underground.

Earlier this year, NASA said almost half of Mars’ northern hemisphere had once been an ocean, reaching depths greater than 1.6 kilometres.

Published in Dawn September 29th, 2015

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