Images of the desolate and windswept Martian surface are not the most encouraging indications of life. But they will nevertheless help scientists in their search for evidence of liquid water and, ultimately, life on the Red Planet.
This picture shows rocky hills, or buttes, in a dusty terrain similar to Monument Valley in Utah and Arizona. The valleys between the buttes are strewn with boulders the size of large houses. The image, captured by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor craft and released last week, covers an area about 1.5 kilometres wide that lies just south-west of the rugged Cerberus region.
Mars…
