TANTALISING hints of liquid water have been found buried under several kilometres of ice on Mars.
MARSIS radar antenna, aboard Europe’s Mars Express spacecraft probed 2 kilometres down at two points in the Red Planet’s northern hemisphere: the mid-latitude lowlands, Chryse Planitia, and the northern polar cap.
The radar signals lost little strength when passing through material filling the bowl of a 250-kilometre-wide impact crater lying below the surface of Chryse Planitia, suggesting it contains a large proportion of ice, which is nearly transparent to radar.
Intriguingly, the bottom of the crater reflects the signal so strongly and appears so…
