New search for life on Mars
For the first time, scientists have discovered a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. The finding offers scientists an exciting new place to search for life forms beyond Earth.
For the first time, scientists have discovered a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. Because water is essential to life, the finding offers an exciting new place to search for life-forms beyond Earth.
Italian scientists working on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission announced Wednesday that a 12-mile wide underground liquid pool — not just the momentary damp spots seen in the past — had been detected by radar measurements near the Martian south pole.
“Water is there,” Enrico Flamini, the former chief scientist of the Italian Space Agency who oversaw the research, said during a news conference.
“It is liquid, and it’s salty, and it’s in contact with rocks,” he added. “There are all the ingredients for thinking that life can be there, or can be maintained there if life once existed on Mars.”
The body of water appears similar to underground lakes found on Earth in Greenland and Antarctica. On Earth, microbial life persists down in the dark, frigid waters of one such lake. The ice on Mars would also shield the Martian lake from the damaging radiation that bombards the planet’s surface.
Jonathan Lunine, director of the Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science at Cornell University, who was not involved with the research, said the finding transforms Mars from a dusty planet to yet another “ocean world” in the solar system.
“I think the more we explore Mars, the more intriguing and complex it becomes,” Lunine said.
For years, “Follow the water” has been the mantra of NASA and indeed humanity’s search for life somewhere else. Without water, there is no life as we know it. In recent years, that has led the space agency to contemplate robot probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, like Europa or Enceladus, where it is now known that salty oceans exist underneath thin shells of ice and where imaginative astrobiologists can envision microbes or more complex creatures.
If Mars was once flush with liquid, was it also flush with life? If astronauts ever crunch across the red sands will they also be crunching over fossils of microbes?
The current findings, however, “cannot say anything more,” Flamini said. “We may guess about what are the conditions and if the conditions are favorable.”