Our best guess: flowing water, and the potential for alien life.

~ Neel V. Patel, September 24, 2015

Inverse.com

By Neil V. Patel

NASA officials will announce Monday morning a major scientific discovery related to their continued exploration of Mars.

The agency won’t give too many details on what exactly the big reveal is, apart from the fact that the briefing will feature some pretty big names at the space agency (including Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA HQ; Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program; Lujendra Ojha, a grad student at Georgia Tech; Mary Beth Wilhelm at NASA’s Ames Research Center, and a grad student at Georgia Tech as well; and Alfred McEwen at the University of Arizona in Tucson).

Nevertheless, there are some clues from the speakers and from the chatter over the web in the last few weeks that we can use to speculate what the big discovery might be.

First up, the odd-person out at the news conference is Ojha, a Ph.D candidate in planetary science at Georgia Tech. Why would NASA invite a grad student to speak at announcement like this?

Back in 2011, Ojha sort of accidentally discovered “possible flows of salt water on Mars.” Ojha was studying gullies on Mars that seemed to be indicative of past water activity, and stumbled upon evidence of liquid, briny water that seemed to spring up in finger-like dark flows — known as “recurring slope lineae,” or RSL — on surface of the planet during warm seasons.

That discovery was made while Ojha, as an undergrad at the University of Arizona, was conducting an independent project with McEwen. The pair, along with other collaborators, published a paper in Science detailing their findings. It caused a huge stir, and scientists went to work trying to confirm this…

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