 Good news, everybody! We found water on Mars! At least, sort of. It's water, but it's not as you would expect it to be, but it's still water, but it's not. But it's water, but it's not water. Water, yeah. It is. And this is your space pod for October 9th, 2015. An announcement about a major discovery on Mars just so happened to occur during the week that a major movie about Mars came out. And that's quite a PR win for NASA. And of course, this is also a big win for us potentially landing a crew on the surface of Mars. But there are also some things that we have to take into consideration with the type of water that is actually on Mars. So, let's go ahead and take a look at it. NASA has a four-tiered holy grail of Mars exploration, and it goes as follows. 1. Was there ever water on Mars? Absolutely, and we confirmed this with the Mars Exploration Rover's data release in 2005. 2. Is there currently water on Mars? Again, absolutely. We found water ice, including a direct find by NASA's Phoenix Lander in 2008. 3. Is there currently liquid water on Mars? As of last week, yes, we now know there is. There's been many hypotheses that it would be found in underground reservoirs, but we have now confirmed that liquid water, I'll bet a special kind, can be found consistently at the surface. 4. Is there life on Mars? This is something that we currently don't know. But all the things you need for life are present on ancient Mars, although that is for another space pod. On September 28, 2015, NASA announced that they found liquid water on the surface of Mars. Sort of. What they actually found were what are called hydrated salts. Now these are salts, more specifically salt molecules that have bonded with water molecules, and that water comes from a source, say like water vapor in the atmosphere, or water rising up from an underground source. These salts, specifically perchlorates, a salt widely found on Mars consisting of one chlorine atom and four oxygen atoms, CLO4, allow water to remain in its liquid state at much colder temperatures than here on Earth. And I mean, we're talking all the way down to minus 70 degrees Celsius, where here on Earth, zero degrees Celsius is the freezing point of water. But this isn't like the water you would expect to find here on Earth, you know, rushing around gullies and carving out canyons. You see, these are small plumes, streaks of water that are going across the surface. They're called recurring slope lineae. They're found mostly in the equatorial regions of Mars and begin developing during the Martian spring, and grow in size until the Martian autumn, when the surface would be at its warmest. How do we know it's water though? Well, modeling the recurring slope lineae has only been successful exclusively with water, and the season variations running from spring through autumn again would only exclusively occur with water. These recurring slope lineae have been seen since 2011, and there's been three seasonal cycles to gather enough data to conclusively say that they are generated by liquid water on the surface of Mars. They also occur at temperatures at around minus 23 degrees Celsius at the lowest, and zero degrees Celsius at the highest. And these temperatures are much too high for carbon dioxide ice. So the only possible culprit for this is water. One thing that we're unsure of is where this water actually comes from. You see, we found these recurring slope lineae occurring on sand dunes, a place that it would be impossible for water to come up from the underground to the surface. It does generate some hesitancy in the planetary protection crowd, as we now have a source of water that we could contaminate, even with our current level of protocol as to sterilizing spacecraft. It adds a level of complication to the hunt for life on Mars. However, this is really good for the potential prospects of a crude mission along that timeline of some time in the next 30 years. You see, there's actually lots you can do with hydrated perchlorates. For one, you can remove the perchlorates and just have water, which you can drink. And you can also use that to make fuel for your rockets if they use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. You can also make methane by pulling out the hydrogen from your hydrates and carbon from the carbon dioxide of Mars' atmosphere. Or if you prefer, you can separate the perchlorates and make solid rocket fuel, such as ammonium perchlorate, which powered the shuttle's twin solid rocket boosters. You can also take that chlorine and develop special sterilization compounds, which could come in handy for making sure humans don't accidentally expose any kind of organisms from the Earth to the Martian environment. Perchlorates can also be used medically, say if due to radiation exposure from the long flight and asteroids thyroid may start running out of control, perchlorates, with the proper medical usage, can inhibit the problems this could cause. Also, we can use that oxygen to generate a breathable atmosphere inside of our habitat, along with a multitude of other potential benefits. Become a Patron and sign up to help us make these amazing things that tell you all about the universe. So, until next week, keep exploring!