“It may exceed the salt content that any terrestrial organisms that we know of can survive in,” he said.Many believed fervently in the story of the martian, however. If it is liquid water, the intense saltiness would make it hard for life, at least life as known on Earth, to survive in the lake, Dr. Is it the only way that signal could be produced? That’s the hard part.” “It’s the kind of signal we would expect for liquid water. Zurek, who was not involved with the research. “You have a lot of interfaces that could do strange things to radar signals,” said Dr. Richard Zurek, the chief scientist in the Mars program office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said the complex, almost chaotic structure of the ice caps could affect the radar signals in unexpected ways. “We came thus to the conclusion that the only possible explanation for the bright reflection was the presence of liquid water,” he said.įor some scientists, the bright radar reflection falls a bit short of proof. The signals did match radar measurements of under-ice lakes in Greenland and Antarctica. Orosei said the scientists checked other possible explanations, like carbon dioxide ice, for the bright reflections, but those did not match the radar observations. “Water tends to collect in lower topography,” Dr. The region corresponded to a basin, adding to speculation that liquid water had flowed into this spot. That suggests that the water is brim full of salts, allowing it to melt. Computer models indicate that temperatures would be about minus-90 Fahrenheit - far colder than the melting point of water. Intense pressure of the overlying ice would warm the ice. It revealed bright reflections in a triangular region as the spacecraft passed multiple times. But the scientists figured out how to send back the raw data to Earth. Once the instrument was working, it sent back uncertain, inconsistent findings over this polar region. In the final evenings of this month, the planet looms like a red lantern in the East, just 35,784,871 miles from Earth - the closest it has been in 15 years. Since humans could see through telescopes across space, Mars has been the favorite abode of imaginary life, the backyard just over the fence where the astronomer Percival Lowell imagined he could see canals and even cities webbing the orange globe. In recent years, that has led the space agency to contemplate robot probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, like Europa or Enceladus, where it is now known that salty oceans exist underneath thin shells of ice and where imaginative astrobiologists can envision microbes or more complex creatures. Without water, there is no life as we know it. Lunine said.įor years, “follow the water” has been the mantra of NASA and indeed humanity’s search for life somewhere else. “I think the more we explore Mars, the more intriguing and complex it becomes,” Dr. Jonathan Lunine, director of the Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science at Cornell University, who was not involved with the research, said the finding transforms Mars from a dusty planet to yet another “ocean world” in the solar system. The ice on Mars would also shield the Martian lake from the damaging radiation that bombards the planet’s surface. On Earth, microbial life persists down in the dark, frigid waters of one such lake. The body of water appears similar to underground lakes found on Earth in Greenland and Antarctica.
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