Mars may have dozens of lakes beneath its south pole
Scientists have found some intriguing but inconclusive radar signals.
By Mike Wall about 18 hours ago
The bright white region of this image, captured by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft in December 2012, shows the icy cap that covers Mars’ south pole, composed of frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide. (Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Bill Dunford)
Much more liquid water may lie beneath the south pole of Mars than scientists had thought — or there may be something going on down there that they don't fully understand.
In 2018, researchers analyzing radar data gathered by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft announced they'd found evidence of a big subsurface lake in the Red Planet's south polar region. The lake appears to be about 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide, and it lies about 1 mile (1.6 km) beneath the dry, frigid surface, the scientists reported.
The same core research team soon followed up on the find, using the same Mars Express instrument — Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding, or MARSIS for short — to study the subsurface in a wide area around the apparent lake. This work turned up evidence for three more underground lakes, each of them about 6 miles (10 km) wide, the scientists reported in a study last year.
Now, a different team has taken a very deep dive into the data. Arizona State University doctoral student Aditya Khuller and MARSIS co-principal investigator Jeffrey Plaut, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, analyzed 44,000 observations MARSIS made of the Martian south polar region over 15 years. (MARSIS was built by the Italian Space Agency and JPL.)
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