This picture has severe problems, and has been challenged by other scientists, including two Australians. Space Daily has published dissenting views in the past and today again publishes the views of one of them, as an exclusive and in full detail. You will not find it anywhere else.

Nick Hoffman, a professor at Melbourne University, has since 1999 contended that Mars has always been dry. He holds that in the past its CO2 atmosphere was far denser than it is now, and that catastrophic outbursts of liquid carbon dioxide from underground carved its valleys. Hoffman's work was knocked back by several major journals. As almost everyone in the field either accepted NASA's view, sympathetic reviewers were hard to find. To the rescue came the Internet, which as all know, transmits some of the wildest notions that ever entered human heads, but which also helps circumvent stifling orthodoxies.

Quite unaware of Hoffman's prior work, the author of today's essay, Peter Ravenscroft, first tackled the same topic months later. He recounts looking at scores of Mars images, in delight and amazement, and then, in rather less delighted amazement and growing puzzlement, reading NASA's interpretations of them. He then assembled his own.

Ravenscroft's model differs from Hoffman's in suggesting that the present atmosphere of Mars may be adequate to explain both the surface features observed and the puzzling lack of many others. His "Long-winded Model of Mars,' as he has tongue-in-cheek tagged it, holds that the keys to understanding the surface features of Mars are the present thin CO2atmosphere, the well-known dust storms, and the odd nature of the unstable sediments coating the surface.

"This," he explains, "first applies Occam's Razor, aka the Kiss Principle, to the task. If present conditions can explain the observed geology, why postulate different past climates for which there is no independent evidence? Earth has no sediments of mixed fine dust and dry ice, at temperatures and pressures very close to the sublimation point of carbon dioxide. On Earth, the only atmospheric gas that condenses or freezes is the small proportion of water vapour in the air. On Mars, though, almost all the "air," both at ground level and below it, between the dust particles, can and does freeze.

The basic textbook of geology, or perhaps more correctly, of sedimentary lithology, will have to be considerably expanded. To date we have all, without realizing it, been water vapour geologists. We now need to understand sedimentation that's driven by other gasses. It's a fine time to be around and puzzled."

Ravenscroft's experience with NASA has been interesting. Believing that, in fairness, any theoretical turn-around should come from within NASA itself, he offered his work to that agency first, without publication. The response, he reports wryly, ranged a bit.

"It ran from polite thoughtfulness from a senior official, never again heard from, through an injunction to go away and read a basic textbook on Mars, from someone rather less senior, to a complete lack of response from the folk doing most of the image interpretation. NASA's admin, when I offered co-operation with or without pay, explained that it only employed American citizens. That is an honour neither offered nor on my wish list. Werner von Braun might have been amused,' he noted.

Why the deep reluctance to consider the new Mars models seriously?

"First of course, NASA is beleaguered by daft heresies, ranging from "a little green UFO pilot ate my grandmother,' to "there is no space program, it's all done with mirrors in a parking lot in Nevada."

Next, this is NASA and the USA's flagship science project, and NASA has nailed its flag to the mast on the water issue, with tacks the size of fence pickets. It would be a touch embarrassing to admit to shoving the current equivalent of the canals of Mars, at everyone from the world's schoolchildren to its science community, for three decades in the face of an avalanche of perfectly clear evidence to the contrary.

NASA gets funding for space science and for its Mars exploration in particular, by constantly nudging the search for extra-terrestrial life into the spotlight. If Mars ever supported life, liquid water was probably needed.

So NASA is searching Mars for water, rather than looking at what is actually there. If the possibility of martian life can be kept on the boil, or more properly, at a comfortable temperature a touch below boiling, funds will continue to flow from a fascinated US electorate. If wrong, their thinking seems to be, the longer we can ignore the problem, the longer we have to pull some other celestial rabbit out of the funding hat."

Does it matter? If NASA is proved wrong, won't it just give the world's schoolchildren a healthy lesson in the value of skepticism regarding the pontifications of high authorities?"

"Not quite. NASA and the ESA, which follows NASA's line on this, are engaged in very expensive sampling programs, and the one lesson that is definitely transferable from Earth exploration to Mars is: garbage in, garbage out.

If you get the basic geology wrong, you will ask the wrong questions, take your samples in all the wrong places, and your results will not help human knowledge nearly as much as they might have. Mars exploration trucks are very impressive, but the drilling and sampling systems they deploy are unavoidably limited.

About as limited as any young terrestrial exploration geologist would dream of deploying in a very bad nightmare, to be precise. So it is very, very important to get the theoretical framework right. To systematically ignore gaping holes in the dominant theory and to refuse to contemplate serious alternatives, is a bit like yawning while watching small pieces of foam repeatedly break off shuttles at launch times. Lives are, happily, not at risk this time, as no astronauts are going to be looking for a drink of fossil water, just yet."

The Australian "drys" contend that, though there is some water on Mars, it did not carve the valleys there, or ever form liquid oceans. They also reckon that, on a clear night, they are just a touch closer to Mars than is Houston. The same holds for you, of course. NASA's planetary geologists can, so far, get no closer to the target than anyone else with a modem and a half-reasonable computer. Also, there are now so many Mars images, that many of them have been considered seriously by exactly no-one.

Space Daily hence invites you to consider the evidence for yourself. Read the linked essay, check out Nick Hoffman's views via Google and NASA's via almost any search engine on the planet. If still interested, pick any selection of the 100,000 plus images of Mars, available courtesy of the American people and NASA. Then consider them closely and decide for yourself.

Here is a real chance to contribute to cutting-edge science, from the comfort of home, and at really cut-price rates. The more thoughtful observers, the better."

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