A vast lake of water in liquid form discovered on Mars

A vast underground lake was discovered for the first time on Mars, where ever such a volume of liquid water, an essential condition for the development of life, had not yet been found, the space agency announced on Wednesday.

Located under a layer of Martian ice, at the south pole of the red planet, the lake is about 20 km wide and suggests the presence of more water, even life, on the red planet, according to an article published in the American journal Science .

The Marsis radar, which was loaded onto the Mars Express spacecraft of the European Space Agency (ESA), collected the data needed for this discovery over a period of three and a half years. The radar continually sends low frequency electromagnetic waves to the planet.

They explore its soil and subsoil for several kilometers deep and are then reflected back to the probe, reporting new information to the radar, summarizes Wired . The waves tend to be reflected more intensely on an icy surface.

Three and a half years of observations

The radar does not fly constantly over the south pole of Mars, it took no less than 29 observations to reach the result announced on Wednesday, notes the American magazine.

"This is a staggering result that suggests that the presence of water on Mars is not just a temporary runoff revealed by previous discoveries, but a permanent body of water that creates the conditions for life. over an extended period of time, "said Alan Duffy, badociate professor at Swinburne University, Australia, who did not participate in the study.

" I can not irrevocably prove that this is water, but I certainly can not imagine anything like that to be anything else, "reacts in the columns of Wired Richard Zurek, scientific head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars program NASA, which is not related to the study.

"Maybe I lack imagination, but it's probably related to a lack of data too," he added, however, stressing that future observations could raise many questions – or provide other explanations.

The planet Mars is now cold, desert and arid, but was previously hot and humid and harbored a large amount of liquid water and lakes at least 3.6 billion years ago.