Although National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokeswoman Mary Hardin said some press reports this week on the finding were incorrect, the US media Thursday was focusing on the data the space agency is about to make public.

The Washington Post said that the Mars Global Surveyor took photographs of what appear to be fresh mudflows seeping from what could be vast underground reservoirs of water.

Finding water on Mars or elsewhere in space would give a significant boost to space exploration, since it would provide both a source of drinking water and fuel, when broken down into its components, hydrogen and oxygen.

Two hundred of the spacecraft's 60,000 images provide detailed views of what look like grooves carved by rivulets flowing in fan-shaped patterns not far below the surface of numerous valley or mesa walls, the daily said.

Members of the NASA team who will report their findings to the public later Thursday called the images disturbing and baffling, the daily said, because they do not seem to fit what they know about the dusty red planet.

"These have all the classic morphology of seepage-induced mass runoff," geomorphologist Michael Malin, who will announce his team's findings, was quoted as saying by the daily.

Gullies eroded into the wall of a meteor impact crater in Noachis Terra. This high resolution view (above, left) from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) shows channels and associated aprons of debris that are interpreted to have formed by groundwater seepage, surface runoff, and debris flow. The lack of small craters superimposed on the channels and apron deposits indicates that these features are geologically young. It is possible that these gullies indicate that liquid water is present within the martian subsurface today. The MOC image was acquired on September 28, 1999. The scene covers an area approximately 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) wide by 6.7 km (4.1 mi) high (note, the aspect ratio is 1.5 to 1.0). Sunlight illuminates this area from the upper left The image is located near 54.8�S, 342.5�W. The context image (above, right) shows the location of the MOC image on the south-facing wall of an impact crater approximately 20 kilometers (12 miles) in diameter. The Mars Orbiter Camera high resolution images are taken black-and-white (grayscale); the color seen here has been synthesized from the colors of Mars observed by the MOC wide angle cameras and by the Viking Orbiters in the late 1970s. Images Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

He said the shape and designs of the features photographed on Mars, "tell us if it isn't water, it's a material just like water. And either it's happening now, or fairly recently -- or our concept of (geological time on Mars) is completely haywire."

Malin runs Malin Space Science Systems, a NASA sub-contractor that designed and built the Surveyor's onboard camera.

USA Today, citing Internet sites, reported Wednesday that the photographs were taken in 1997 in the central part of the Vallis Marineris, an immense canyon 6,000 kilometers (3700 miles) long.

The water source had not been detected earlier because it appeared seasonally, during the Martian spring, the daily said.

Scientific work on the discovery will be published next week in the Science magazine, but the journal's editors decided to release the information a week earlier because of the interest of its findings, The New York Times said Thursday.

Billions of years ago, water flowed abundantly on the surface of the red planet, but its atmosphere subsequently became so thin it could not prevent surface water from evaporating off the planet.

But at a depth of three meters or more, subterranean pressure is sufficient to permit water to gather.

The Martian poles -- covered in ice made of water and frozen carbonic gas -- could contain enough water to enable human colonies to survive.

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