NASA planning permanent lunar base
Evidence of water currently flowing on Mars
An international team of astronauts will be living and working at a permanent moon base to be built at one of the resource-rich lunar poles within two decades, NASA announced Monday.
Earth's first off-world colonists will cruise the surface in a lunar lander that will function like a low-gravity pickup, possibly journeying to the dark side to build the most ambitious collection of observatories ever constructed, NASA said.
"We will begin with short missions. Then we will build up to the point where we are staying 180 days, and then we will have a permanent presence," Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems, said at a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The base could be operational by 2024, officials said.
Planetary scientists announced today that they have found evidence that liquid water still flows over the surface of Mars — sporadic gushes that open the possibility that the Red Planet could harbor some form of life.
Using images obtained from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, a team of NASA scientists has concluded that geologic changes in the shapes and sizes of gullies in the walls of Martian craters could only have been made by liquid water.
The team looked at two sets of images taken several years apart. In both cases, the second set of images revealed a light-colored substance several hundred yards long that had not been there before.
"The shapes of these deposits are what you would expect to see if the material were carried by flowing water," said Michael Malin, president of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, the firm that built the camera that took the pictures released today. "They have finger-like branches at the downhill end and are easily diverted around small obstacles."
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