Was Percival Lowell kind of, sort of, almost right? In the early 20th century, Lowell speculated that Mars had canals that criss-crossed the surface and intersected with one another. Telescopes at the time could neither prove him right nor wrong, and Lowell argued that these canals were the engineering work of an advanced civilization. That idea has passed into history, and our understanding of the Martian surface has changed from fanciful guesswork informed by hazy images to certainty generated by high-resolution cameras aboard multiple Mars orbiters. Those images have shown that there are no canals and no technological civilization, but there are natural waterways. Shalbatana Vallis is an ancient water channel on Mars in the Oxia Palus quadrangle. Oxia Palus has varied terrain including ubiquitous craters, lava, chaos terrain and water channels like Shalbatan Vallis. The European Space Agency's Mars Express Orbiter (MEO) has imaged Shalbatana Vallis with its High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC).…