AS MARS made its closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years this week, scientists’ hopes that the planet was once warm and wet – which would have favoured the emergence of life – drifted further away than ever.
A new analysis of the composition of the planet’s dusty surface makes the presence of large pools of water in the past seem unlikely, says Joshua Brandfield, a member of a team from Arizona State University in Tempe.
Brandfield and colleagues scoured data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, which has been in orbit around the planet since 1997. They looked for evidence of…
