Slug: Perspective Hed: To Keep on Looking Hed(alt. suggestion): Thinking Outside the Box Dek: As we explore Mars, our neighbor planet forces us to imagine otherworldly evolution, and redefines our own sense place in the Solar System Pq: As we bring Mars closer to us through the explorations of our robotic and remote vehicles, the planet will continue to work its way into the big picture of human experience. WC: 1045 Before NASA's Mars Global Surveyor stopped calling home in November, the satellite—which had been orbiting our neighbor planet since 1997 and was the source for the Google Mars data—captured a compelling image. Relayed back to Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, CA, was a photograph of what looked like a newly-formed stream bed that flowed down a gully into the base of a crater. Researchers were stunned, because the exact same location had been photographed five years prior by Surveyor, and had revealed no such feature. The image itself is remarkable: it shows the flow—which appears lighter against the darker, older terrain around it—emerging from the Martian surface several hundred meters up a steep incline along the inside edge of a crater. It traces a course downhill until reaching the nearly flat bottom, where it spreads out like the fingers of the Mississippi delta. Mike Malin, the chief investigator and President of Malin Space Systems that built and operated Surveyor's Mars Observer Camera, authored a paper in Science hypothesizing that what Surveyor had captured was in fact evidence of a EFTA00588918