Miles O’Brien:
Well, Amna, I guess scientists, myself, and anyone who watches this closely would have been surprised if they didn't find liquid water beneath the surface. But it's not an easy thing to do.
You know, really, when you think about this, this is the culmination of about 150 years of work that began with an Italian astronomer by the name of Schiaparelli, who trained his telescope on Mars and saw what he called canali, which, translated, should mean channels, but got mistranslated into canals, and really started off a whole trend which led us to "The War of the Worlds" and the idea that there were really Martians.
This has gone on recently with NASA missions, including the Pathfinder missions, the Curiosity, Spirit, and Opportunity missions, where there was all kinds of inferences of past water, mineralogical data, that sort of thing.
Finally, the discovery of water ice at the poles. So, think about it for a moment. You have got all this evidence of distant, ancient water. You have got water ice at the poles. You know you have a hot core in the middle.
So if there's a hot core in the middle, water ice at the poles, somewhere along the way, there has got to be water. And that's what they discovered.
And the significance of that is, on this planet, wherever we find liquid water, no matter where it is, bottom the ocean, in a hot acidic bath in Yellowstone, underneath a glacier in Antarctica, wherever that may be, you find life.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7sa7SZ6arn1%2Bjsri%2Fx6isq2ejnby4e8uinZ5ln6N6rq3RrGSwmaSav7p5zZ6uZpyZqLCwwsSrsGaqkZ7Apr%2BMrZinrJGhtru1zaBkqaejqLajtcuiq6Kdow%3D%3D