Yes, these Canals are where the Martians are living.

I saw it in this documentary...

http://www.youtub...HJvF59Fg

Richard Hoagland could probably come up with a pretty creative hypothesis

Hopefully the water is as a liquid at least some of it.


It should be frozen, if it is there at all. This area isn't close enough to the equator for it to melt.

There are lava tubes near the surface in other areas, closer to the equator though. The problem, of course, is that you really probably want to check several different lava tubes, and they are probably too far apart to check two of them with one mission.

A rover designed to be more mobile and cover more land might eventually be desirable, especially if a particular site is under considderation for a human landing. If you knew that you'd be able to investigate things in detail later, it would be nice to do a survey of all the things around. Maybe you could even set up something like Google Maps Street View?

Related: NASA wants to send a duplicate of Curiosity to Mars. Maybe it could be reconfigured to investigate at least one lava tube?


I'm sure that ranks really high on the list of possible targets. The problem with lava tubes is that the ones we have identified from satellite images are visible only because they have what are called skylight features, where they have partially collapsed. It might be risky driving a 2000 lb rover near such a feature. The ground near the skylight could be weak. I think you would want some kind of extendable boom, so that you could keep your distance and then lower your instruments into the hole on a cable. That's an awefull lot of mass and engineering work for such a specific target. Then there's not any garuantee that there's anything interesting inside the tubes either.