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Colorado Scientists Help With Mars Water Discovery

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. (CBS4)- Local Colorado companies played a big role in NASA's discovery of water on Mars. Both Lockheed Martin and Ball Aerospace have several devices above Mars and returned data that helped scientists.

"We build the spacecraft. Science institutions from around the country provide the instruments, we integrate the instruments into the spacecraft and then we launch and operate the space craft out at Mars," said Guy Beutelschies the Director of Interplanetary Missions at Lockheed Martin.

MARS WATER
Guy Beutelschies, Director of Interplanetary Missions at Lockheed Martin with CBS4's Jeff Todd (credit: CBS)

Scientists in 2008 confirmed the existence of frozen water on Mars. Now instruments aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have yielded what researchers said is the strongest evidence yet that water in liquid form trickles down certain Martian slopes.

And because liquid water is essential to life, the finding could have major implications for the possibility of microscopic life forms on Earth's next-door neighbor.

Lockheed Martin's southern Jefferson County campus is home to a Mars control center overseeing the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, the MAVEN orbiter and the Phoenix Lander.

Maven
NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft (credit: BRUCE WEAVER/AFP/Getty Images)

"MRO was seeing the pictures of these dark streaks and then both the camera and the imaging spectrometer contributed to nail down that it was liquid water with salts in it," said Beutelschies.

The pictures came from the HiRISE camera built for the University of Arizona by Ball Aerospace in Boulder County.

"We've been seeing streaks on the surface of Mars from the pictures coming back through our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite and it's great," said Beutelschies. "It's great to hear the scientists have finally confirmed it's due to liquid water."

Hale Crater mars
Hale Crater (Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona via Getty Images)

Lockheed has several more projects for future Mars missions. InSIGHT is another lander that will test the planet below the surface. It's set to launch in March 2016 and arrive at the planet a year later.

Test flights are underway on the Orion project that will eventually take a human to Mars. The hope is for that to happen sometime in the 2020s.

Orion spacecraft
(credit: Lockheed Martin)

Jeff Todd joined the CBS4 team in 2011 covering the Western Slope in the Mountain Newsroom. Since 2015 he's been working across the Front Range in the Denver Headquarters. Follow him on Twitter @CBS4Jeff.

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