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This beautiful ESA image of the Martian surface is titled Cappuccino Eddies at the South Pole of Mars.
ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / Bill Dunford
Make sure to bring some floats for your arms and a really big drill for when you fly to Mars. There may be a whole world of ponds filled with water hidden beneath the dry and dusty planet’s southern ice sheet.
A new study led by researchers at the Roma Tre University in Italy reinforces the case of a 2018 discovery of a lake hidden under the Martian polar iceand then expand the find to include three new ponds.
The researchers used radar data from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter to make their original detection of liquid water.
“Now, taking more data into account and analyzing it in a different way, three new ponds have been discovered,” ESA said in a statement Monday. The team published their study in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday.
The lakes seem to lurk under heavy ice. The largest lake is about 19 miles (30 kilometers) wide and is surrounded by a series of smaller ponds.
The researchers hope that the water must be incredibly salty to stay liquid at low temperatures. A seperation 2019 study suggested volcanic activity It might help keep the water from freezing, but the current article leans a lot toward the concept of salt.
“While it is not possible today for the water to remain stable on the surface, the new result opens up the possibility that a complete system of ancient lakes exists underground, perhaps millions or even billions of years old,” said ESA.
Humans are busy searching for signs of life, particularly evidence of ancient microbes, on Mars. NASA’s new Perseverance rover will continue this search from the surface of the red planet. Liquid water reservoirs would be an especially tempting place to search for life, but reaching these ponds would be extremely difficult. There is 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) of ice on the trail.
We may not get great responses from the Martian South Pole anytime soon, but it could give us a future target for exploration once our technology is up to the challenge.
