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Marte, released in 2016, showed how to realize the dream of sending an inhabited ship to this planet. According to the series, humans would have "started" in 2033, after securing the water supply, which would have allowed the installation of the first colony.
According to the book How will we live on Mars ?, By Stephen Petranek, The series depicts the scientific interest in finding permanent water, because its presence not only opens up the possibility to colonize the planet, but also to find life.
Today, a study makes the transition from fiction to reality not so improbable: this Wednesday has been confirmed the detection of a liquid lake of considerable extension under the polar cap south of Mars (see infographic).
The finding corresponds to a survey of scientists from the Italian Space Agency, published by Science magazine The evidence of the presence of this lake were obtained by Mars Express, a spacecraft spacecraft from the Space Agency European (ESA) which orbits around the planet and has an instrument called "advanced radar for underwater and ionospheric soundings". [19659002] Marsis emits radio wave impulses and "listens" to the reflections (echoes) that they cause on the surface of the red planet. Some of these waves bounce off the surface, but others can penetrate up to three kilometers and think differently if they pbad through ice and rock, or ice to water, through example.
From the orbit of the red planet It has penetrated the ice and has detected the surface of a cold lake full of salts. The work was done thanks to the records detected by the Marsis between 2012 and 2015 in an area known as Planum Austral.
Roberto Battiston, president of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the agency that made the finding, qualified as "the most important in recent years."
Luis Chavarria, director of Conicyt's astronomy program, states that "you can not deduce what is below, because you can not see it."
indicates that there is an extension that has a very strong echo, which is expected in the case of liquid water. "These observations give the indication that this area may have liquid water.The radar does not provide more details and can be mixed with rock, for example."
Juan Carlos Beamín, researcher at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and at the Institute of Physics and Astronomy of U. Valparaíso, highlights the discovery because until now, it was known that there was ice , but he had failed to establish whether there was water under the surface, "they had not been found, even if they had been searched."
explains Beamín, and probably contains minerals such as potbadium, magnesium, calcium perchlorate. "They are probably in large quantities, and the water with these minerals can be in the liquid state, despite the low temperatures, which in this case reach at least 60 degrees to one kilometer deep."
The question of the possibility of the existence of life is now what remains unresolved. Without water, there is no life, it is an essential requirement for life as we know it, says Beamín. "This does not mean that there is life, that water is a necessary but not sufficient requirement, but that gives us hope."
There are many examples. On Earth, microbial species have been found in Lake Vostok, a huge reservoir of water buried under 4 km of ice in Antarctica; it is the same in the poisonous and arsenic-rich waters of Mono Lake, California; in the Atacama Desert, Chile, an "oasis" of bacteria, archaea (primitive microorganisms) and biological remains have been discovered, organisms that have absolutely no need of Oxygen or sunlight to survive
. find a "biological deposit" in this Martian lake, because there is evidence that some bacteria can survive at low temperatures thanks to saline substances.
Liquid Water
When scientists began to badyze Marsis recordings, they frequently saw small, brilliant echoes beneath the South Pole ice cap, with such a bright reflection, that this could be an indication that 39, there were not only rocks under the ice, but also liquid water. However, they did not believe that the signal was real because it only appeared in some orbital pbades, but not in others.
But after a few adjustments, they finally confirmed that it was liquid water. "We did not see what was right under our noses," said Roberto Orosei, Marsis' principal investigator at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, at Science
. surface as possible liquid water is protected from what is happening above the surface, "because the atmosphere of Mars is weak and does not protect the surface."
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