Liquid Water Beneath Martian Ice? |
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Written by spacetravel.org
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Sunday, 11 December 2005 20:17 |
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Signals from the MARSIS radar antenna, aboard Europes Mars Express spacecraft, indicate that there might be liquid water beneath several kilometres of ice on Mars.
When passing through material filling the bowl of a 250-kilometre wide impact crater lying below the surface of Chryse Planitia, the radar signals lost little strength. This suggests that the crater contains a large proportion of ice, which is almost transparent to radar. The bottom of the crater reflects the signal so strongly and appears so flat that, according to William Johnson of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, it may be liquid water.
Another explanation could be that rock which melted on impact flowed to form a flat cover on he crater floor.
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