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Is There Water on Mars?

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We Asked a NASA Scientist.

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The short answer is yes. Now, we have to think
about, how do we actually define water?

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It's not quite like on Earth, but it's definitely
there. Water is a molecule that has one

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oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. The ice on
Mars is a little bit different than on Earth.

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On Earth, usually the ice is just, you know,
water ice. But on Mars, it's actually water ice

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and CO2 ice mixed with each other. On Mars, it's
just so cold that it gets frozen, so you actually

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have those mixed together both at the poles and
underneath the surface as well. We even have

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water in the atmosphere as a water vapor.
It's a very small amount, but it's there.

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We also have water inside of rocks. So, you can
think about rocks as sort of a stack of layers

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and sometimes there's water trapped in between
those layers. We've actually measured this with

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a lot of the different missions from NASA and
that's actually what I study. And the last state

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of potential state of water is, do we have liquid
water on Mars? The answer is we haven't really

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observed it. We do see these dark streaks on some
hillsides that we call recurring slope lineae.

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One idea is that these slope lineae could
be formed by the flow of liquid water.

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But there's also other ideas where you actually
don't need liquid water to explain the formation

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of these dark streaks. Maybe they could form
through sand flow or that kind of thing.

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So, is there water on Mars? Not quite like the
oceans we know on Earth, but it's definitely there.