Liquid water found flowing on Mars? Not yet

Pelletier said, "Right now the balance of evidence suggests that the dry granular case is the most probable."

They added that their research does not rule out the possibility that the images show flows of very thick mud containing about 50 percent to 60 percent sediment. Such mud would have a consistency similar to molasses or hot lava. From orbit, the resulting deposit would look similar to that from a dry avalanche.

The team's research article, "Recent bright gully deposits on Mars: wet or dry flow?" is being published in the March issue of Geology. Pelletier and McEwen's co-authors are Kelly J. Kolb, a UA doctoral candidate, and Randy L. Kirk of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Jon D. Pelletier is an associate professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Click here for more information.

NASA funded the research.

In December 2006, Michael Malin and his colleagues published an article in the journal Science suggesting the bright streaks that formed in two Martian gullies since 1999 "suggest that liquid water flowed on the surface of Mars during the past decade."

Malin's team used images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbital Camera (MOC) of gullies that had formed before 1999. Repeat images taken of the gullies in 2006 showed bright streaks that had not been there in the earlier images.

Subsequently, Pelletier and McEwen were at a scientific meeting and began chatting about the astonishing new finding. They discussed how the much more detailed images from HiRISE might be used to flesh out the Malin team's findings.

Pelletier had experience in using the stereoscopic computer-generated topographic maps known as digital elevation models (DEMs) to figure out how particular landscape features form.

DEMs are made using images of the landscape taken from two different angles. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft is designed to regularly point at targets, enabling high-resolution stereo images, McEwen said.