In the January 5 New York Times, Kenneth Chang reports on the photographs taken in the last month by the extraordinarily high-res camera in NASA’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter:

Images taken by the camera, able to see features down to about a yard in size, have revealed details like rippled textures in what had looked like bland dusty regions, and researchers can now count tiny craters, enabling them to better estimate the age of terrains.

This is obviously bed-wettingly exciting stuff for planetary geologists, who are using the findings to bolster the contention that Mars was in the distant past a far more hospitable place, “wet and maybe warm.”

But did Mars sustain life? And is life there now? No conclusive signs are offered in these most recent images, but the question is one that is always on the front of the minds of those doughty men and women who make the study of Mars their lives’ work. In our November 2008 issue, Astrid Van Sarisgaard reviewed three recent books about the red planet

, and found that most tantalizing question looming throughout all three. Click over to learn more about Mars–and stay for the comments field, which contains a discontented rebuttal from one of the book’s authors!