Water Under Mars.

On Mars theirs one of the warmest, wettest - and most habitable - of the areas with surface clay is next on the list for Man to visit, in the form of the car-sized Curiosity rover. Launching this year, the Curiosity rover will land and investigate layers that contain clay and sulphate minerals. NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, in development for a 2013 launch, may provide evidence for or against this new interpretation of the Red Planet’s environmental history. The report predicts MAVEN findings consistent with the atmosphere not having been thick enough to provide warm, wet surface conditions for a prolonged period. It might seem a difficult to work out what's beneath the surface of Mars – or even setting up a mining program to access the wells. but impact craters and erosion have revealed the 'insides' of the Red Planet. Now scientists believe that warm water mingled with rocks rocks beneath the surface of Mars in 'hot springs' for hundreds of millions of years - and that this may have been longer-lived than Mars's surface water. Scientists now believe these are the most likely place for there to have been life on Mars.

Cratering and erosion combine to reveal clay minerals at thousands of Martian sites - analysis of the minerals suggests a long period of wet, warm conditions underground, which scientists believe may have supported life If surface habitats were short-term, that doesn’t mean we should be glum about prospects for life on Mars - but it says something about what type of environment we might want to look in,' said Bethany Ehlmann, scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. 'The most stable Mars habitats over long durations appear to have been in the subsurface. 'The NASA scientists point out that 'geothermal' areas on Earth - hot springs - play host to life. 'The types of clay minerals that formed in the shallow subsurface are all over Mars,” said John Mustard, professor at Brown University in Providence. Mustard is a co-author of the study in the journal Nature. 'The types that formed on the surface are found at very limited locations and are quite rare.'

On the hunt for intelligent complex life as the Harvard Professor Abraham Loeb believes we have nothing to lose by taking his approach to finding ET. For a self-illuminated object, the brightness varies by a factor of 1 over the distance squared, but if you have an object that reflects light from another source 'the flux dies out like 1 over the distance to the fourth power', Prof Loeb said. He said monitoring the changes in brightness of an object in a disk of icy material known as the Kuiper Belt on the edge of our solar system could provide a 'very simple test' to determine whether extraterrestrials have turned on the lights.  ‘Conclude that existing telescopes and surveys could detect the artificial light from a reasonably brightly illuminated region, roughly the size of a terrestrial city' Professors Loeb and Turner write. They admit it is not a likely scenario, but say artificially lit Kuiper Belt Objects might have come from civilizations from other stars.The technique could conceivably be extended to other stars once next-generation telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope come online, over the next decade or so, it was reported in media has been debated whether the traditional search for ET using radio signals might be wasteful if alien civilizations have moved beyond analogue transmissions so trace-ability like movements or lights.