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The high seas of Mars may never have existed. According to a new study that looks at two opposite climate scenarios of early Mars, a cold and icy planet billions of years ago better explains the water drainage and erosion features seen today.

That's a lot of assumptions along the way, what do you think of it Nina?

Look at the video... are they really going to pull this off?

> it will be lowered on to the surface of Mars with a landing system that has never been tried before yikes!

nice article .... but "Jacques Blamont from JPL" is a bit ridiculous!!!

"NASA's proposed budget for 2011 is $19 billion," Brown says. "That's about three weeks of the war in Iraq." + interesting video on new rover design ("tumbleweed" rover)

that's why I quit ESA - I'll join NATO, more promising career ahead

I thought you became an EC bureaucrat ...

i assume he was being ironic. otherwise it's an obvious future ariadna

hahaha !!! Venezuela should team up with the US to send a robot to Mars to look for some bank vestiges :))

Sounds pretty much Sci-Fi...

Localized high concentrations of methane have been discovered by the Curiosity rover. This points to localized sources of methane of yet unknown nature. Maybe the ACT's odor source localization should be resurrected!

Here's the an English article on the topic: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/16/methane-spikes-mars-fuel-speculation-life-nasa-curiosity

Some locations on Mars are known to have water ice just below the surface, but how much has remained unclear. Dundas et al. used data from two orbiting spacecraft to examine eight locations where erosion has occurred. This revealed cliffs composed mostly of water ice, which is slowly sublimating as it is exposed to the atmosphere. The ice sheets extend from just below the surface to a depth of 100 meters or more and appear to contain distinct layers, which could preserve a record of Mars' past climate. They might even be a useful source of water for future human exploration of the red planet.

an experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. It might be a bit far-fetched but I thought it might be useful when exploring new planets. Combined with AI the robot would able to assess the terrain and deploy another robot the shape of which would be chosen to best suit its environment. I was thinking of this in the context of exploring places on other planets which are inaccessible by regular rovers (e.g. caves on Mars).

Curiosity suffered from BSoD...

nothing new but nicely written

Another Star Trek technology :) Might have an positive psychological effect if astronauts on long term missions could virtually escape their confinement - walking through a labyrinth with the blue sky above them. Ok, ISS does not provide enough space, but on Moon or Mars...

Is there not a risk that while walking in circles this way the cable I keep dragging behind will eventually strangle me?

Let's all start up some crazy space companies together: harvest hydrogen on Jupiter, trap black holes as unlimited energy supplies, use high temperatures close to the sun to bake bread! Apparently it is really easy to do just about anything and Deep Space Industries is really good at it. Plus: in their video they show Mars One concepts while referring to ESA and NASA.

hmm aside from the technological feasibility, their approach still should be taken as an example, and deserve a little support. By tackling such difficult problems, they will devise innovative stuffs. Plus, even if this doom-to-fail endeavour may still seem you useless, it creates jobs and make people think... it is already a positive! Final word: how is that different from what Planetary Resources plan to do? It is founded by a bunch of so-called "nuts" ... (http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/) ! a little thought: "We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond" - Proust

I don't think that this proposal is very different from the one by Planetary Resources. My scepticism is rooted in the fact that - at least to my knowledge - fully autonomous mining technology has not even been demonstrated on Earth. I am sure that their proposition is in principle (technically) feasible but at the same time I do not believe that a privately funded company will find enough people to finance a multi-billion dollar R&D project that may or may not lead to an economically sensible outcome, i.e. generate profit (not income - you have to pay back the R&D cost first) within the next 25 years. And on that timescale anything can happen - for all we know we will all be slaves to the singularity by the time they start mining. I do think that people who tackle difficult problems deserve support - and lots of it. It seems however that up till now they have only tackled making a promotional video... About job creation (sorry for the sarcasm): if usefulness is not so important my proposal would be to give shovels to two people - person A digs a hole and person B fills up the same hole at the same time. The good thing about this is that you can increase the number of jobs created simply by handing out more shovels.