Washington, March 5: In what could influence the likelihood of finding life on Mars, astronomers have claimed that flowing lava could have possibly made river-like channels on the Red Planet.
Whether the meandering channels on Mars were formed by water or lava has been debated for years. Now, a team has pointed out that flowing lava could have played a vital role in this connection.

“To understand if life, as we know it, ever existed on Mars, we need to understand where water is or was,” said Jacob Bleacher of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, who led the team.
For their research, the astronomers carried out a study of a single channel on the southwest flank of Mars’ Ascraeus Mons, one of the three Tharsis Montes volcanoes.
The team relied on detailed images from three cameras: the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), Context Imager (CTX) and High/Super Resolution Stereo Color (HRSC) imager, as well as earlier data from Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA).
From these images, the team pieced together more than 270 km of the channel.
At the source of the channel, the visual clues seem to point to water. But at the channel’s other end, an area not clearly seen before, the astronomers found a ridge which appears to have lava flows coming out of it.
In some areas, “the channel is actually roofed over, as if it were a lava tube, and lined up along this, we see several rootless vents,” or openings where lava is forced out of the tube and creates small structures, Bleacher said.     —PTI