Okay. Thanks. They don't really state that sort of thing in the press reports. I mean, yeah, it was obvious to me it was a liquid that created those geological features but why water was my immediate thought. Cheers.
It may well not have been water as we know it It may well have been extremely toxic water laden with all kinds of salts but that's for further analysis, evidence seems to be stacking up for free flowing water of some kind though!
I think they already have, there were some reports that the water would have been unlikely to be conducive to life, will try to look that up, should be on the BBC news site Science pages as well I think.
If the water on Mars had had a high content of solids in solution, those solids would have been deposited as the water evaporated or sublimated. In most cases the deposited solids would be visible to a telescope, surely. (snow in Beijing falls, turns black and sublimates leaving little piles of soot - it is very very dry and the temperature never reaches anything as warm as 0 deg.C!)
I have just found a BBC article that was postulating that the surface had a heap of evaporated salt(s) on it. "US scientists think the mineral formed when water evaporated from salty lakes or soil billions of years ago." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7302591.stm
Earth life 'may have come from Mars' "Life may have started on Mars before arriving on Earth, a major scientific conference has heard. New research supports an idea that the Red Planet was a better place to kick-start biology billions of years ago than the early Earth was. The evidence is based on how the first molecules necessary for life were assembled. Details of the theory were outlined by Prof Steven Benner at the Goldschmidt Meeting in Florence, Italy." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23872765
