Discover ice mines on Mars

The ice at the northern tip of Mars.It appears as a layer to the right of the black and white image

Radar antennas on Europe's Mars Express spacecraft have detected signs of liquid water at a depth of 2 km below the surface of Mars.

Marsis antenna was successfully deployed in June 2005 after a series of problems. It works by transmitting radio pulses to Mars and analyzing the time interval and pulse intensity back.

When entering the surface, radio waves bounce back when encountering near-surface boundaries between materials of different electrical properties, such as water and ice. However, in addition to an experiment that the Apollo 17 conducted on the Moon in 1972, this technique has not been tested elsewhere.

William Johnson and his colleague from NASA Jet Jet Laboratory have just published the near-surface measurements of two regions in the Northern Hemisphere - the low-lying Chryse Planitia and the North Pole. According to them, a circular structure, with a diameter of 250 km at a depth of 1.5-2.5 km below the surface of Chryse Planitia, is a deep hole created by meteorites. This pit has been buried by volcanic ash or land buried billions of years ago. The strength of the radar signal decreases very little when passing through the pit. This phenomenon shows that there must be a large amount of ice there.

In addition, Marsis also explored the North Pole cap and discovered almost pure water tape 1.8 km thick below the surface. The above measurements are the result of three times Marsis collected data under special conditions. Marsis's upcoming research areas are the Southern Hemisphere, including the South Pole.

Minh Son ( According to NewScientist )