http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/current<\/a><\/p>\nLooking back at this work what strikes me is how far Mars research has progressed in the last few years.\u00a0 As I was saying at\u00a0 talk at a local community college last night, our view of Mars keeps changing as our imaging improves.\u00a0 If I had given the talk 100 years ago, I would have discussed the pros and cons of Percival Lowell’s canals theories.\u00a0 In the 1940’s I would have discussed the evdience for vegetation on Mars causing seasonal changes in the albedo of the planet.\u00a0 In 1964, the first\u00a0Mariner 4\u00a0flyby produced grainy images with indistinct craters – were they volcanic or impact in origin?\u00a0 Even just 10-15 years ago in an equivalent talk I would have been debating whether the metre-scale layers that were being identified by orbital imagers were volcanic or sedimentary in origin.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the Peace Vallis conglomerates and Yellowknife Bay mudstones we have unequivocable proof for a habitable environment, with near neutral pH, brackish pore water heated to around 50 o<\/sup>C, fine for any microbes.\u00a0 But were there ever any microbes on Mars? That part of the puzzle remains to be determined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Science Magazine papers about Yellowknife Bay have just been published: http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/current Looking back at this work what strikes me is how far Mars research has progressed in the last few years.\u00a0 As I was saying at\u00a0 talk at a local community college last night, our view of Mars keeps changing as our imaging improves.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}