Scientists have been predicting there is water on Mars and are trying to find the evidences for it, they must, however, just be getting tricked by the Mars’ orbiter whose glitch shows a mirage delusion.

A recently published study has determined that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s task of handling water data is flawed, which automatically invalidates earlier discoveries of salty water flows found on the Red Planet.

As explained by Engadget, the orbiter’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) can be confused by some high-contrast areas, and that the software used to correct that data can accidentally give off fake signs of hydrated salts called perchlorates, hinting at the salt water flows. In the corrected results, there appeared to be plenty of perchlorates, but there were none in the raw data.

The researchers found the glitch while looking for small signs of salts in CRISM images. They started seeing perchlorates everywhere. Upon closer inspection, they realized that the salts showed up even in places where it made no sense for them to form. This is what made the scientists suspect the error.

The lack of the salts could mean that some of the sites that were thought to hold any form of life, including purported streaks of liquid water on the walls of Martian craters, are most likely to be dry and lifeless, reported Science News.

However, this glitch does not rule out every hint of salty water presence, but whatever is there might be difficult to distinguish. The researchers are now developing a detection method that would use numerous pieces of evidence instead of the one from before.