European Space Agency - Latest News Update, Information, Photos & Videos on European Space Agency at Lokmat Times

New York, July 4 Subsurface lakes found under Mars' south pole, using data from the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, may not really be lakes at all, argue researchers.Two research teams in 2018, working on data from the Mars Express orbiter announced a surprising discovery: Signals from a radar instrument reflected off the red planet's south pole appeared to reveal a liquid subsurface lake.However, a team of scientists at NASA and Arizona State University (ASU) found dozens of similar radar reflections around the south pole after analysing a broader set of Mars Express data.But, according to them, many are in areas that should be too cold for water to remain liquid."Usually, radar waves lose energy when they travel through a material, so reflections from deeper down should be less bright than those from the surface," said Aditya Khuller of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration."Although there are a few possible reasons for unusually bright subsurface reflections, these two studies concluded that a liquid water component was the cause of these bright reflections, because liquid water appears bright to radar," added.The radar signals originally interpreted as liquid water were found in a region of Mars known as the South Polar Layered Deposits. The areas originally hypothesised to contain liquid water span about 10 to 20 kilometres in a relatively small region of the Martian South Polar Layered Deposits.For the new study, the team expanded the search for similar strong radio signals to 44,000 measurements spread across 15 years of MARSIS data over the entirety of the Martian south polar region.It revealed dozens of additional bright radar reflections over a far greater range of area and depth than ever before. In some places, they were less than a mile from the surface, where temperatures are estimated to be minus 63 degrees Celsius so cold that water would be frozen, even if it contained salty minerals known as perchlorates, which can lower the freezing point of water."We're not certain whether these signals are liquid water or not, but they appear to be much more widespread than what the original paper found," said Jeffrey Plaut from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)."Either liquid water is common beneath Mars' south pole, or these signals are indicative of something else," added Plaut.Mars Express is the second-longest-surviving continually active spacecraft in orbit around a planet other than Earth, behind only NASA's still-active 2001 Mars Odyssey.Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor

European Space AgencyFOLLOW

European space agency, Latest News

Washington, Oct 15 The Hubble Space Telescope observations of Jupiter's icy moon Europa have revealed the presence of ... ...

Washington, Oct 7 An Indian-American astronaut is part of NASA-SpaceX's third mission to the International Space Station. "NASA's ... ...

Washington, Oct 4 The Hubble Space Telescope, an international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency), has ... ...

Washington, Sep 25 The Hubble Space Telescope, an international cooperation between NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency), ... ...

NASA on Tuesday announced scientists have spotted a previously unrecognized feature of our Milky Way galaxy: A contingent of young stars and star-forming gas clouds is sticking out of one of the Milky Way's spiral arms like a splinter poking out from ...

Paris, Aug 9 Two spacecrafts, part of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the US space Agency NASA, ... ...

New Delhi, Aug 9 From synchronised space swimming to 'lack of floor routine' gymnastics, astronauts at the International ... ...

New York, July 4 Subsurface lakes found under Mars' south pole, using data from the European Space Agency's ... ...