UPDATE: The post below is WRONG. The difference in the two images is not something on the ground. The right camera was indeed imaging the ground; however, on the image from the left camera, the bottom left corner of the image is actually a part of the robot itself: the leading edge solar panel. Hey, even I make mistakes. I'm going to leave the rest of the post as-is though; there's no point in saying "I was wrong" unless you can see what it is that I was wrong about.
Sir Charles Shults III has been doing lots of work over the last year and a half, analyzing the images being returned by the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Among the more startling of his findings are that NASA has been editing the images to make the sky appear more red than it actually is, and that there is fossil evidence of multicellular marine organisms present.
His latest finding turns the prevailing orthodoxy about Mars on its ear. In a pair of images from Sol 50, he has spotted evidence of liquid water on the planet Mars today.
I have reproduced the images here. The first image was taken by Opportunity in Eagle crater with the left panoramic camera, using the violet (432 nm) filter, at about 12:01:24 local time.
The original image may be found at the NASA/JPL website here.
The second image was taken with the right panoramic camera, also using a violet (436 nm) filter, at about 12:02:48 local time, about 84 seconds later.
The original image at the NASA/JPL website is here.
Pay special attention to the bottom left corner of each image. In the first image there is something that absorbs violet light (and is therefore dark when viewed through the violet filter); it is missing in the second picture, exposing gravel underneath. Nothing else in the image has changed - no sand blown around. The only other differences between the two pictures is that they have been taken at slightly different angles, and in the second picture the camera was aimed a little bit to the right of the first image.
Full colour images of the area are available at Sir Charles' website.
The images clearly show something there, then not there anymore. That something is flat, bluer than the surroundings, and leaves without affecting anything else in the image. It is water.
So, what happened to it? Well, it either boiled/evaporated or else it soaked into the soil - probably a combination of both processes. Now, that puddle didn't last very long, which means that it wasn't likely there for very long before the first picture either. None of the other images from that Sol show puddles of water, so it was caused by a very localized event, most likely due to the spray of a geyser.
From this we can only conclude that there is water under the soil of Mars, very close to the surface, which occasionally is sprayed up by geyser action.
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