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In 1996, the Galileo spacecraft sent images of the moon of Jupiter Europa, on which we could see thick ice shells. Among them was suspected of liquid water, and in it – life. The sensation was so great that a second discovery the same year did not stand out: even on Earth, in Antarctica, there are ice sheets under which the liquid water is: On the biggest from these lakes – Lake Vostok, 250 kilometers long, 50 wide – came in 1996, it's shown with radar at 3623 meters deep.
A group around Roberto Orosei (Bologna) has now spotted something similar, where you or NASA with unprecedented effort for water – life – is looking on Mars. On what the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had sighted a network of fine lines in 1877, he called them "cbadi", grooves, in English became "channels" which had to be water, and somebody else. one must have built someone with great intelligence. The popularized US astronomer hobbyist Percy Lowell, he also nurtured the imagination of H. G. Wells, who imagined in 1898 in the "War of the Worlds" an invasion of the land by the Martians. Orson Welles translated it so realistically into a radio play in the United States in 1938 that mbad panic broke out
Mighty Icefields at the South Pole
But on the surface Mars did not show any signs of a sudden death. liquid water – it can not, are too hard – and countless traces that once left behind liquid water in the topography of the neighbor, and that resemble the river bank, are probably not caused by water, but by wind or liquid CO2. However, water in frozen form has already been seen, especially at the South Pole, where it stores so much that it would cover the entire planet eleven feet tall if it was liquid. And under this ice, now also the liquid water has shown, at least to interpret the researchers of what they see on the images that MARSIS has delivered, the advanced radar of Mars for the Subsurface and Ionosphere poll: This is a transmitter and a meter aboard the Mars Express probe, orbiting the neighbor, sending a radar into the ground and following its path. The images now show a 20-kilometer lake at a depth of 1.5 kilometers, the images are similar to those of Lake Vostok. However, the temperatures in this region do not allow the existence of pure liquid water – at the South Pole it is minus 68 degrees – it could act of a brackish broth in which the salts of sodium or calcium depresses the freezing point (Science 25: 7).
Can there be life in such water? Bacteria adapt to the most difficult conditions, but not everywhere there is water: Lake Vostok was drilled in 2013, hoping to find microbes that have developed differently since the Antarctic ice age. there are 35 million years. The rest of life on earth. You did not find anything (or bacteria that had died as a contaminant on the drill head, and you could not drill 1.5 kilometers anyway on Mars.)
Hottest Candidate for Life : Europe
Remains as a candidate for extraterrestrial life or its observation of Europe.This moon is so shaken by the gravity of Jupiter that in the ice cracks open, through which the liquid water springs, sometimes even in the fountains.However, it can be cosmic and radiant Therefore, Tom Nordheim (NASA) has now mapped the radiation on Europe from the Galileo probe data and badyzed its effect on amino acids in the laboratory (Nature Astronomy 23.7.): It strikes one In the less polluted regions, there would be a probe of only one centimeter deep scratching the ice
("Die Presse", edition printed, 26.07.2018) [19659009]
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