Speculation on the Internet has been running wild since late Monday when word came of a special White House briefing by NASA of something new that has been found on Mars.

After discounting the usual wild ideas of winking faces and what not, the money appears to be on some sort of discovery relating to water at a low point in the Valles Marineris where the atmospheric pressure of Mars may be high enough to allow standing water.

Meanwhile, NASA Watch is reporting that a paper is under preparation by members of the MGS Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team for submission to Science magazine. NASA Watch further reports "Informed sources within NASA suggest that the article may be concerned with water ice and the Valles Marineris region of Mars."

Additional speculation has focused on outgassing or volcanic processes being observed over an extended period. Although Mars still has the potential for volcanic activity the planet is largely cooled with only occasional eruptions.

Providence - December 9, 1999 - In an article to be published in Science magazine Dec. 10, 1999, Brown University planetary geologist James Head and five colleagues present topographical measurements which they say are consistent with an ocean that dried up hundreds of millions of years ago. The measurements were taken by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, an instrument aboard the unmanned spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor which is circling the planet.

San Diego - October 1, 1999 - After extensive imaging surveys via the Mars Global Surveyor now in orbit of possible shorelines previously identified by Viking, the conclusion of scientists at Malin Space Science Systems and JPL is that Mars probably never had a large body of liquid water - constituting an ocean - in the low lands of the Martian northern hemisphere.

Iowa City - September 8, 1999 - University of Iowa professor and space physicist Don Gurnett has won a $4 million NASA contract in collaboration with JPL to develop and use radar in a search for underground water on Mars. The UI investigation is part of an international project aboard the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft scheduled for launch in 2003. Formally known as Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), the joint Italian-U.S. project includes the University of Rome and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Co-Investigator Gurnett at the University of Iowa.