& çâÌæÚUæð´ ·¤è ¥ôÚU Îð¹Ùæ ÁæÚUè ÚU¹ð´ ¥ÍæüÌ ¥ÂÙð ÜÿØ ÂÚU ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´Ð ãæÚU Ù ×æÙð´, €UØô´ç·¤ ·¤æ× ·¤ÚUÙð âð ¥æÂ·¤ô ©gðàØ ·¤è Âýæç# ãôÌè ãñ ¥õÚU ÁèßÙ ·¤æ ¹æÜèÂÙ ÎêÚU ãôÌæ ãñÐ ÖÜð ãè ÁèßÙ ×ð´ ç·¤ÌÙè Öè ·¤çÆÙæ§ü €UØô´ Ù ¥æ°, çÁ™ææâæ ¥õÚU ©ˆâæã ÕÙæ° ÚU¹ð´Ð ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´, ÜÿØ ã×ðàææ ¥æÂ·Ô¤ Âæâ ãôÌð ãñ´ çÁ‹ãð´ ÂæÙð ·Ô¤ çÜ° ÂýØæâ ¥æÂ ·¤Öè Öè àæéM¤ ·¤ÚU â·¤Ìð ãñ´Ð

Signs of watery past

Mars rover finds gravel left by vigorous stream

AFP, Washington
Nasa's Mars rover has discovered gravel once carried by the waters of an ancient stream that "ran vigorously" through the area, the US space agency said Thursday.
Scientists had previously found other evidence of the one-time presence of water on the Red Planet, but this is the first time stream bed gravel has been
discovered.
The rocky Hottah outcrop looks "like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it's really a tilted block of an ancient stream bed," project scientist John Grotzinger said in a statement.
The Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Mars since early August, also investigated a second outcrop known as Link.
SEE PAGE 19 COL 5 FROM PAGE 20
The pictures transmitted by Curiosity show the pebbles have been cemented into layers of conglomerate rock at a site between the north rim of the Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, where Curiosity is heading.
The sizes and the shapes of the rocks give an idea of the speed and the depth of the stream, Nasa said.
"The shapes tell you they were transported, and the sizes tell you they couldn't be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow," said Curiosity scientist Rebecca Williams.
Scientists estimate the water was moving at a brisk pace of three feet per sec-
ond, somewhere between ankle and hip deep.
"This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars," said Curiosity science coinvestigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley.
"This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it."
Some of the rocks are rounded, indicating they travelled a long distance from above the rim, fed from a channel named Peace Vallis, Nasa said.
And thanks to imagery previously captured from Mars's orbit, the scientists said they can see an alluvial fan of material washed down
from the rim — with many apparent channels uphill of Link and Hottah.
The high number of channels between the rim and the newly-discovered rock bed suggests the stream wasn't a one-time occurrence, but that many streams flowed or repeated over a long period of time.
Curiosity is on a two-year mission to investigate whether it is possible to live on Mars and to learn whether conditions there might have been able to support life in the past.
The $2.5 billion craft landed in Gale Crater on August 6, opening a new chapter in the history of interplanetary exploration.