A look back at amazing Mars

Compiled by Jessica Durando | USA TODAY Network

Scientists reported Monday "definitive signs of liquid water" on the surface of Mars. A new study finds that Mars boasts multiple seeps of salt-laden water that were wet, or at least damp, as recently as last year.

See how amazing the 'Red Planet' is:

1. See a blue sunset on Mars

Images captured on April 15, 2015, by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover found that the red planet's sunset is actually blue. Why? The blue sky is caused by fine dust in the atmosphere, according to a statement from Mark Lemmon, a Curiosity team member from Texas A&M University in College Station.

2. Spacecraft lands on another world

Curiosity rover, the size of a compact car, landed on Mars in August 2012. NASA celebrated the flurry of photographs-- grainy, black-and-white images of Martian gravel, a mountain at sunset and perhaps most marvelous, the rover's move through the planet's atmosphere. The journey to Mars took eight months over 352-million miles.

3. Methane shows Mars is not dead planet

Methane in the atmosphere of Mars points out that the planet is still alive, in a biologic or geologic sense, according to a team of NASA and university scientists.

"Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars in 2003 indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas," said Dr. Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "At northern mid-summer, methane is released at a rate comparable to that of the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Oil Point in Santa Barbara, Calif."

4. Odyssey finds water ice

Scientists found "enough water ice to fill Lake Michigan twice over" using instruments on NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft, according to a NASA press release.

"This is really amazing. This is the best direct evidence we have of subsurface water ice on Mars. We were hopeful that we could find evidence of ice, but what we have found is much more ice than we ever expected," said Dr. William Boynton, principal investigator for Odyssey's gamma ray spectrometer suite at the University of Arizona, Tucson.