Gullies lacing the surface of the Red Planet look similar to the ones that carved out on our planet by flowing water, but a latest deep look at Mars has found no proof that the life-giving liquid was responsible for the Martian features.

Mars surface seems to light up in pastel shades of green, pink, blue, and purple, in a latest picture captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The colors have shed light on the chemical composition of an area that includes some gullies streaking around the surface like veins.

In a statement, NASA said that though a few scientists had hypnotized that the gullies are made in a style similar to that of gullies on our planet, typically through a process that includes liquid water, latest composition maps of over 100 gully has shed light on no proof of ‘abundant liquid water or its byproducts’ in the shallow channels.

There are some clues that scientists’ posses, which could be help in their attempt to find out how the formation of the Martian gullies have taken place. They could get some information about the comparatively recent geologic activity on mars. As per the NASA statement, “First, the Martian gullies are a widespread and common feature on Mars, mostly between the 30- and 50-degree latitudes in both hemispheres, and generally occur on slopes that face toward the poles”.

The study’s main author, Jorge Núñez of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said earlier observation by MRO's powerful High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera demonstrated seasonal activity in gullies.

Seasonal differences in the features of surface have typically suggested that whatever is behind the features was probably experiencing changes linked to temperature fluctuations, like water melting and freezing.

According to a report in Santa Fe New Mexican by Sarah Kaplan, "Levin snatched the sheet and scrutinized the freshly inked graph. A thin line measuring radioactive carbon crept steadily upward, just as it always did when Levin performed the test with microbes on Earth. But this data came from tens of millions of miles away, where NASA’s Viking lander was — for the first time in history — conducting an experiment on the surface of Mars."

“I was sort of set aback,” recalled NASA chief astrobiologist Penny Boston, who was still in college at the time. “I was thinking, ‘Gosh, I want to work in exobiology, as we called it at the time, and now it seems like it’s just a pile of rocks, and there’s no life there at all.’“

The issue with the Viking experiments is that they expected to find too much too soon, speaker after speaker explained over the course of the conference. Detecting life with Viking would have been a breakthrough of unprecedented proportions, and science doesn’t usually happen that way. Most “breakthroughs” come after years of accumulating incremental increases in knowledge.

A report published in Space revealed, "The surface of Mars appears to light up in pastel shades of pink, purple, blue and green in a new image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The colors show the chemical composition of a region that includes a handful of gullies streaking across the surface like veins."

Scientists have a few clues to work with when trying to unravel how the Martian gullies form — and from there, learn something about the relatively recent geologic activity on the planet. First, the Martian gullies are "a widespread and common feature" on Mars, mostly between the 30- and 50-degree latitudes in both hemispheres, and generally occur "on slopes that face toward the poles," according to the NASA statement.

Because different chemical elements absorb light differently, it's possible to "read" light coming from an object and see the different elements present therein with an instrument called a spectrometer. So the team aimed another MRO instrument at the gullies, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM). (HiRISE captures optical images, and thus couldn't provide any evidence about the minerals in or around the gullies.)