No life on Mars?

A study of meteorites chipped off the surface of Mars suggests the planet has been frozen for 4 billion years and probably never had the warm wet conditions that could have given rise to life, two researchers said.

"First, we evaluated what the meteorites could have experienced during ejection from Mars, 11 to 15 million years ago, in order to set an upper limit on the temperatures in a worst-case scenario for shock-heating," said Benjamin Weiss, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They concluded the two meteorites were unlikely to have been above the boiling point of water during their ejection from the martian surface 11 million years ago.

"Our research doesn't mean that there weren't pockets of isolated water in geothermal springs for long periods of time, but suggests instead that there haven't been large areas of free-standing water for 4 billion years," fellow student David Shuster said.

Excerpt taken from Yahoo News