There is probably water on Mars, but you wouldn’t want to drink it. It’s salty, viscous and quite possibly toxic. But astrobiologists are nonetheless excited about the possibility.
Just in the past few years, orbiter cameras and Mars landers have gathered evidence that watery liquid does exist on the Red Planet, at least during some part of the day or some part of the year. The presence of water in such an inhospitable environment—freezing cold, with low atmospheric pressures that drive rapid evaporation—is a bit of a puzzle. But a number of lines of research indicate that perchlorates, a form of salt found in Martian soils by the Phoenix lander in 2008, may play a key role in sustaining liquids on Mars.
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