Show Signs of Water Evidence of massive sedimentary deposits strengthens the theory that billions of years ago Mars had the conditions needed for the evolution of life. Dr. Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for Space Science, spoke on the scientific implications of a similar discovery made in June. If the planet ever harbored life, researchers said, they will find its fossil remnants sandwiched within these hardened layers of water-laid sediment, as they are on Earth. Scientists already had evidence that water once somehow flowed on Mars, but a clear understanding of exactly when and under what circumstances has eluded them.
Liquid water is considered an essential ingredient for life.
The new findings, said to predate all previously proposed signs of water, lay out a detailed and potentially controversial scenario depicting Mars as a water world of lakes, even perhaps shallow seas, between 4.3 billion and 3.5 billion years ago. Mars has long fascinated Earthlings because, in all the alien cosmos, it is in so many ways the most Earthlike. And yet the fourth planet from the sun seemed in other ways more like the Earth's dead moon. Jim Garvin, chief of Mars exploration at NASA headquarters, said Malin and Edgett have put together a comprehensive narrative of Mars that incorporates a wealth of new evidence compiled by all the Surveyor's instruments, not just from its camera images. We've never had that before, ever. . .