And, It's Moist

Perhaps the face on Mars has been crying (distraught, perhaps, by the high-res images that showed that, alas, there is no actual face on Mars), but, according to a paper published in the recent issue of Science (via SkyTonight.com), there may actually be water on Mars:

Michael Malin (Malin Space Science Systems) and four colleagues present compelling evidence that liquid water flowed across the surface of Mars in the past seven years.

The evidence comes from the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which fell silent in early November. This high-resolution imager spotted fresh deposits in images of two crater slopes taken in 2004 and 2005 that did not appear in earlier pictures. "The shapes of these deposits are what you would expect to see if the material were carried by flowing water," says Malin, who is MOC's lead scientist. He argues that liquid water exists underground and collects behind icy dams along crater walls. When those barriers fail, water episodically rushes out, perhaps mixed with salts or other materials, and then flows downhill before evaporating into the thin Martian atmosphere.

If it turns out that there is indeed flowing water on the surface of Mars, it raises the possibility of there being (or having been) life on Mars. That being the case, we may not want to be so gung ho about curing the common cold.