Liquid Water Found On Mars? No Srsly Guys, Maybe This Time Yes?

Every cosmonaut geek knows one thing: you can’t go a month or two without a new story about water on Mars. Or life. Microbes and water. Every month, coming atcha courtesy of our favorite Red Planet. This time, the OH MY GOD WATER ON MARS storyline revolves around the Spirit Rover, and its dumb ass getting stuck in Mars’ soil. Dost it drag up some interesting bullshit whilst stuck there? Why, just maybe!

io9:

For the past year and a half, Spirit has been stuck at a Martian site called Troy, where the rover’s wheel broke through a crust and churned into soft sand. But it hasn’t sat completely idle. NASA researchers have used Spirit’s downtime to investigate the soil at Troy, and have found the site may see liquid water during certain climate cycles.

Near the soil’s surface sit relatively insoluble minerals, which the researchers believe to be hematite, silica and gypsum. Further down in the soil are ferric sulfates, more soluble minerals that the researchers speculate were carried down in the soil by liquid water. None of the minerals are exposed at the surface despite the wind constantly stripping and altering the landscape, which indicates that the minerals were carried down relatively recently and continuously, with the ferric sulfates being carried down further than the less soluble minerals.

Interesting? Sure. Sure? Sure! I’m waiting for the day the US government finally unveils the fact that it found artifacts from a fallen human civilization. You know, the one that made it to Mars, only to have their existence on Earth obscured from history by the fact that they were wiped out by a prehistoric robot uprising. Clearly, they colonized Mars, and but were then wiped out again. By a robotic uprising.