List of evidence for water on Mars Options

[pumpkinpie]

Does there exist a list of all the evidence of water on Mars, listed by spacecraft?

Ideally, it would be a list with a short description and a link to a story or news release. For example:

Mars Global Surveyor: NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows in Brief Spurts on Mars http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/new...s-20061206.html
Phoenix: NASA Spacecraft Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/...x-20080731.html
Opportunity: NASA Mars Rover Finds Mineral Vein Deposited by Water http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20111207.html

I know I could spend some time and extend the list that I've started above, but if someone or some organization has already done it I'd hate to reinvent the wheel!

Thank you.

[dvandorn]

It seems to me that the confirmation of liquid water mostly impacts landing site selection for future missions, in that the planetary protection protocols specifically prohibit any landings near liquid water with any lander at a sterilization level less stringent than that defined for the Viking landers (i.e., less than 30 spores per vehicle). Otherwise very attractive sites may end up on the verboten list if there are close-by RSL's.

Any idea if this might affect the landing site selection for the 2020 rover? Especially considering the fact that the 2020 rover will be caching samples for potential return -- if you land near RSL's, you have to postulate not only sterilizing the rover to the Viking standards, but also whatever follow-on vehicle collects the samples and returns them to Martian orbit...

-the other Doug

[JRehling]

Any idea if this might affect the landing site selection for the 2020 rover?

I would suspect not. The two kinds of environments seem probably distinct, although I recall Spirit finding that "magic carpet" surface and wonder if it was actually on top of some briny liquid or slush.

The elephant in the room is that there are two distinct exploration pathways – Past Water vs. Current Water – and surface missions typical of ones we've seen that pursue one pathway aren't pursuing the other, so there needs to be some strategy. If only one of these pathways existed, we'd be pursuing it. Given that two pathways exist, do we "finish" one before starting the other, interleave them with separate mission architectures, or find a way to combine them?

One possibility for combining them would be to have a single craft for Mars-orbit-to-Earth sample return, and have sample returns from both kinds of environment travel from Mars surface up to that return craft. With craft weighing many tens of kg and samples weighing and 10 g, that would provide a lot of savings if we acknowledge that both kinds of sample return are desirable. Further savings would be achieved in sharing clean ground facilities on Earth for examining samples.