USQ finds water on Mars
RESEARCHERS from the University of Southern Queensland were part of an international team that has found evidence of a patchwork of salty lakes below the surface of Mars, which could hold the answer to finding some form of life on the planet.
It is the first water found on the Red Planet since 2018 when a lake was discovered beneath the Martian south polar ice cap.
USQ joined an international team for the new study, examining radar data from MARSIS, a scientific instrument on board the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft.
Their findings, published yesterday in the journal Nature Astronomy, point to the existence of multiple ponds of hypersaline water.
Co-lead author Sebastian Lauro from Roma Tre University in Italy said the team borrowed a methodology commonly used in radar sounder investigations of subglacial lakes in Antarctica, Canada and Greenland, adapting the method to analyse old and new MARSIS data.
“The interpretation that best reconciles all the available evidence is that the high intensity reflections (from Mars) are coming from extended pools of liquid water,” he said.
University of Southern Queensland’s Centre for Astrophysics research fellow and paper co-author Graziella Caprarelli said laboratory experiments that studied the stability of hypersaline aqueous solutions (brines) helped explain the presence of liquid water.
“These experiments have demonstrated that brines can persist for geologically significant periods of time even at the temperatures typical of the Martian polar regions (considerably below the freezing temperature of pure water),” she said.