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March 3, 2004 Washington, D. C. - The large NASA press room had filled with reporters and half a dozen television crews Tuesday afternoon to hear principal scientists and NASA officials confirm that the Opportunity rover had shown them geological evidence of water in the Martian bedrock. Ed Weiler, Ph.D., Associate Administrator for the Office of Space Science at NASA Headquarters, opened the press conference by saying, "Opportunity has landed in an area of Mars where liquid water once drenched the surface. Moreover, this area would have been a good habitable environment for some period of time."
Finding solid geological evidence that liquid water had once flowed or pooled in lakes on Mars has been a major goal of the Opportunity and Spirit rover missions. Steve Squyres, Ph.D., Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Principal Investigator of the Mars Rover Mission, described the four pieces of water evidence.
Interviews:
Steve Squyres, Ph.D., Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Principal Investigator of the Mars Rover Mission, Pasadena, California: "We have concluded that the rocks (at El Capitan in bedrock) here were once soaked in liquid water. One question is: were these rocks laid down in liquid water? We don't have an answer for that one yet. ... The second question is: were these rocks acted upon, altered, by liquid water? And the answer to that, we believe definitively, is yes. We have four different pieces of evidence that have lead us to that conclusion.
The first one has to do with the little spherical objects a few millimeters in size. We've been calling them 'spherules.' Actually, within the team, we've nicknamed them 'blueberries,' because if you look at them, they - like blueberries in a muffin - are embedded in the bedrock and weathering out of it. They are little, tough, round things inside the rock.
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