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Rome, 25 July. – After years of debate over the presence of liquid water at March an Italian team has verified the existence of an underground lake, liquid and salty, under a layer of ice , which was one of the Mars Express probe missions of the European Space Agency (ESA) sent to the Red Planet.
The research, published in the journal Science, was presented today at the headquarters of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and was qualified by its president, Roberto Battiston, as "the most important these last years."
The important discovery signed by a team of Italian researchers concludes that in a region called Plamun Austral, located in the ice layer of the South Pole of Mars, the profile that draws the radar is very similar to that of the large lakes of 39 liquid water found under Antarctica and Greenland on Earth.
The lake is located, according to the cough, under 1.5 kilometers of ice, extends for about 20 kilometers and would have a thickness of only one meter, but it is also salty, or it would not look like that it was liquid water at temperatures between -20 and -70 degrees Celsius.
Roberto Orosei, first author of the study and scientist responsible for the Italian-American MARSIS radar installed on the Mars Express probe, explained in an interview to Efe the details of one of the most important discoveries since March and for the It took more than five years of studies
It all started "to observe the radar data coming from the base of the southern ice cap of the South Pole compared to the normal material that we had from remainder of March. " [19659003] These are strong echoes of the radar, which on Earth are always translated into water, because "it has the peculiarity of reflecting these echoes in a strong way as we have discovered in this type of situation. in "But after this first clue, discovered in 2007, we realized that these strong echoes, concentrated under the whitest part of the Martian polar ice cap, were not groundwater from Antarctica or from Greenland. "
" Orosei explained.
The researchers continued to study and still noticed these strong echoes, but they changed day by day even though it was the same area, until they surrendered. account that it was a radar problem "which sent an average of strong and weak echoes found so that it was impossible to properly calculate."
They changed the radar software and it took more than three years to observe and collect data from this area, then another two years to write the research and verify that these echoes were relative to the presence of the radar. water because they had the experience of carbon dioxide. "
" We came to the conclusion that any other explanation we would like to give to these loud echoes was far less likely than what it was water, "said the scientist.
Orosei also pointed out that this lake is salty.
Radio waves can pbad, the ice must be very transparent and this occurs at -20 degrees Celsius, so the liquid water that is in contact with the ice has to to have the same temperature or to undo it, "he said.
] But with these temperatures the water does not freeze, it must have a significant amount of salts and" from this we deduced that There is a lot of salt, since the pressure of 1.5 kilometers of ice and the low gravity of Mars is not enough for that. "
And the eternal question: Are there any remains of life on Mars?" The authors of this research explain that this lake could well be a "biological deposit."
"Although we did not know the exact composition, we believe that it is a type of environment in which certain terrestrial bacteria could survive and could therefore ecologically and eventually inhabited deposit.There are bacteria that feed on salts for their development. "
For this researcher from the Italian Institute of Astrophysics, we will now have to look for other types of lakes like this one or the last thermal vestige and certify that "Mars is"
"If we find more lakes like this, we could conclude that Mars was once a temperate planet where we could have lived," he said.
Orosei said: Mars "did not not finished, but finally started and years of ob service are waiting for us ". EFE
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