Tag: mars

 

What lies beneath the layered south pole of Mars? A recent measurement with ground-penetrating radar from ESA’s Mars Express satellite has detected a bright reflection layer consistent with an underground lake of salty water.

The reflection comes from about 1.5-km down but covers an area 200-km across. Liquid water evaporates quickly from the surface of Mars, but a briny confined lake, such as implied by the radar reflection, could last much longer and be a candidate to host life such as microbes.

Pictured, an infrared, green, and blue image of the south pole of Mars taken by Mars Express in 2012 shows a complex mixture of layers of dirt, frozen carbon dioxide, and frozen water.

Image Credit & License: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; Bill Dunford

 

What’s happened to Mars? In 2001, Mars underwent a tremendous planet-wide dust storm — one of the largest ever recorded from Earth.

To show the extent, these two Hubble Space Telescope storm watch images from late June and early September (2001) offer dramatically contrasting views of the martian surface.

At left, the onset of smaller “seed” storms can be seen near the Hellas basin (lower right edge of Mars) and the northern polar cap. A similar surface view at right, taken over two months later, shows the fully developed extent of the obscuring global storm.

Although this storm eventually waned, in recent days a new large dust storm has been taking hold of the red planet.