Liquid water ponds found under Mars ice

By Aaron Mamiit Published April 28, 2022

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission has detected liquid water buried under ice on the red planet.

MARSIS, short for Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding, found three ponds of liquid water. The mission earlier discovered an underground reservoir in 2018.

Recommended Videos

The largest underground lake measures 20 kilometers by 30 kilometers and is surrounded by several smaller ponds.

Mars Express’ discovery raises the possibility that there is a system of ancient lakes beneath the surface of Mars that may be up to billions of years old, according to the ESA. The underground ponds could be ideal locations to search for Martian life, but it will be very hard to access them, the agency said.

In 2018, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found sites where thick ice deposits under Mars’ surface are exposed, which makes them accessible to missions on the planet.

Meanwhile, research published in January found that the very small amounts of water vapor left in Mars’ atmosphere is being lost even faster than previously believed, further reducing the chances of finding surface water on the planet.

Contributor

Aaron received an NES and a copy of Super Mario Bros. for Christmas when he was four years old, and he has been fascinated…

Topics

Space

Take a flight over Mars’ Ares Vallis in a new video from Mars Express

mars ares vallis flyover screenshot 2024 11 30 234209

A new video shows what it would be like to cruise over the surface of Mars, zooming in to the planet from orbit and into a channel called the Ares Vallis. Created from data taken by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express mission, it shows the region where NASA's Pathfinder mission landed in 1997.

Fly around Ares Vallis on Mars

Space

Check out this incredible panorama of Mars taken by Curiosity

NASA’s Curiosity captured this panorama using its Mastcam while heading west away from Gediz Vallis channel on Nov. 2, 2024, the 4,352nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The Mars rover’s tracks across the rocky terrain are visible at right.

The Curiosity rover has been on Mars since 2012, and in that time it has driven more than 20 miles -- which might not sound like a lot, but is a long distance for a rover traveling at slow, careful speeds that are somewhat less than the average garden snail. The rover has now reached the end of an area it has been exploring for the past year -- a channel called Gediz Vallis -- but before it moved on, the rover snapped a series of images of the area, which you can explore in this NASA panorama:

Curiosity Rover Leaves Gediz Vallis Channel (360 View)

Space

Planetary defense mission Hera blasts off toward Mars

Hera will perform a swingby of Mars in March 2025 as a way of gathering extra momentum on its way to the Didymos binary asteroid system. The spacecraft will fly within the orbits of both Martian moons Deimos and Phobos, and perform science observations of the former body and the planet's surface, in synergy with the UAE's Hope orbiter and gathering preparatory data for JAXA-DLR's MMX Martian Moons eXploration mission due to be launched in 2026.

The European Space Agency (ESA)'s planetary defense mission, Hera, has completed the first major maneuver of its journey following its launch in October. The spacecraft has burned its thrusters to put it on a course toward Mars, which it should reach to perform a gravity assist flyby in 2025.

The mission is a follow-up to NASA's DART mission, which deliberately crashed into an asteroid in 2022. DART was testing to see whether impacting a spacecraft into an asteroid could alter its trajectory, which it succeeded in doing. The idea is that if an asteroid should ever threaten Earth, space agencies could send a spacecraft to crash into it and knock it off course.