Hasta La Gadget!

Maybe Percival Lowell was on to something after all: A new analysis of canal-like features on Mars offers more evidence of flowing water on the planet’s surface, possibly as late as several hundred thousand years ago, according to Scientific American.

Images snapped by a camera on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a gully that’s about one kilometer across, with a delta-like fan at the bottom. Researchers discovered an array of craters on the delta’s western portion, and suspect that a large meteorite impact scattered rocks to create what’s called secondary craters, according to the article.

Tracing backwards, the pattern of pockmarks led to a large impact crater about 100 kilometers to the southwest. The crater’s presence helps geologists date the gully, which researchers believe indicates water activity, possibly due to melting snow from an older Martian ice age.

“We had hoped to find the source of these secondary craters, and voilà, we found a link to this big crater,” said lead study author Samuel Schon, a graduate student at Brown University’s Planetary Geosciences Group, in the article.