Flower Dance

News from around campus

By Technology Review

01/01/2001

Martian Meteorology Comes to Light

Last fall, Mars came closer to Earth than it has in nearly 60,000 years. It was an exciting event for novice astronomers, focusing media attention on the planet and once again raising the question geophysics professor Maria T. Zuber has been pondering since childhood: was there ever life on Mars?

Zuber, along with researchers from NASA, the Russian Space Research Institute, and the University of Arizona, has been gathering information about Mars to reconstruct the history of water on the planet. The researchers estimate that, currently, the top meter of ground at polar latitudes is 90 percent by volume water in ice form. But images show that water once flowed on the planet, even if temperatures were just barely above freezing when it did. Zuber's question is, how long did the thaw last? The longer there was liquid water on Mars, the higher the odds that life could have been sustained. "On Earth, everywhere you have water, you have life," says Zuber, who became head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences in July.

Zuber's research combines the data relayed by two NASA spacecraft with gamma ray spectrometers that can distinguish the planet's elements, such as hydrogen, and altimeters that measure its topography. "Our perceptions of Mars have changed drastically in the last decade," Zuber says, noting we once thought of Mars as a desert rather than a frozen tundra. "It's been a golden age of exploration."