Study points to cold, wet Mars past
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LONDON - Mars might have once been both cold and wet, researchers said yesterday , suggesting a freezing Martian landscape could still have produced water needed to sustain life.
There has been debate over the issue because with some researchers believing water likely formed many features of the planet's landscape and others pointing to evidence indicating that early Mars was cold with temperatures well below the freezing point of water.
Using a computer model, Alberto Fairen of Universidad Autonoma in Madrid and colleagues showed that both could have been possible because fluids containing dissolved minerals would have remained liquid at temperatures well below 273 degrees Kelvin, the freezing point of pure water.
The presence of water on Mars is a hot topic for scientists. They have presented strong evidence of huge deposits of frozen water at the Martian poles and point to geological features that indicate large bodies of water have flowed on the planet's surface in the distant past.
