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Liquid Bodies Found under South Pole of Mars

Photo: AP

Photo: AP

Several liquid bodies have been found under the south pole of Mars, giving extra credence to previous research that indicated a large saltwater lake below the Martian surface.

Significant new study findings may be crucial to discovering alien life on the earth, the researchers notice, provided life as we know it needs liquid water to live, reports The Independent.

They will also be crucial to the "planetary defense" work that ensures that human beings do not contaminate other planets with life from Earth during missions to explore them.

Researchers are calling for future studies to further analyze Mars, its chemistry – and whether there might be signs of what they call "astrobiological activity" or alien life.

The discovery was made using MARSIS or the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding, which is aboard a Mars Express spacecraft sent by the European Space Agency to orbit around Mars.

The instrument sends radar pulses that can penetrate the soil and the Mars ice caps.

They can then be measured as they bounce back into the spacecraft, enabling researchers to dig into the earth without ever touching it.

In the new study , researchers led by Elena Pettinelli of Roma Tre University used techniques borrowed from Earth satellites to study lakes underneath Antarctic glaciers.

By doing so, they were able to analyze data from MARSIS that looked at a large array around the body they had found on Mars. This allowed them to confirm that it was liquid.

They were also able to find a variety of other patches, isolated from the main body by dry areas, which together seem to make up a patchwork of different salt lakes.

“Not only did we confirm the position, extent and strength of the reflector from our 2018 study” said Professor Pettinelli, “but we found three new bright areas.

“The main lake is surrounded by smaller bodies of liquid water, but because of the technical characteristics of the radar, and of its distance from the Martian surface, we cannot conclusively determine whether they are interconnected," she said in a statement.

The data tend to suggest that the bodies are "hypersaline solutions" – a brine in which high amounts of salt are dissolved in water – which is perhaps the reason why they are able to remain liquid despite the very cold conditions of Mars' southern pole.

The fact that there is a whole set of lakes indicates that they have possibly evolved relatively quickly, and that versions of them may have been present in the history of the world. If that were the case, they might have acted as a refuge to alien life that flourished when Mars was more easily habitable – and those lakes left behind may have been a refuge for whatever life is still around.

“While the existence of a single subglacial lake could be attributed to exceptional conditions such as the presence of a volcano under the ice sheet, the discovery of an entire system of lakes implies that their formation process is relatively simple and common, and that these lakes have probably existed for much of Mars' history,” said Roberto Orosei, principal investigator of the MARSIS experiment.

“For this reason, they could still retain traces of any life forms that could have evolved when Mars had a dense atmosphere, a milder climate and the presence of liquid water on the surface, similar to the early Earth."

The study, 'Multiple subglacial water bodies below the south pole of Mars unveiled by new MARSIS data’, is published in Nature Astronomy.

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