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| Signs of Salty Water on Mars. |
Scientists after rigorous research have once again found out some life supporting elements on Mars.
Well, it wouldn't be inappropriate to say that- Seeing the extreme unpleasant and unsuitable living problems on Earth, Humans now have an eye on Mars.
A research paper recently published in the journal "Nature Astronomy", said that scientists have in total, found four underground water lakes in the south pole of the Red planet.
The team of scientists utilised the European space agency’s ‘Mars Express Spacecraft’ which has a radar instrument called MARSIS – Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding to carry out their probe on the southern polar region of the planet. Eventually, MARSIS sends out signal to the surface of the planet and gets reflected back which is then intercepted indicating the composition of surface at the origin such as ice, rock and water, as in the journal ‘Nature’.
Smaller surrounding lakes have also been discovered. This comes after the discovery of same such lake came into being in the year 2018 which was spread across a wide-area of 20 sq.km and was 1.5 km under the Martian surface.
At present, the water that has been found in the lakes is expected to be extremely salty, as a result of which it poses hazardous uncertainty for any potential life form. According to information cited on BBC, Italian researchers have claimed that these newly found lakes do resemble the scope of the presence of habitat in the past. They have further inferred that; earlier Mars might had relatively life-supporting warmer climate but then it did go through a climatic catastrophe before transforming into a frozen waste. With much scepticism, they concluded that amidst the climatic transformation, there might have been some form of life that could have existed on the Martian surface.
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| Signs of unclear claims of existence of life on Mars. |
Due to extreme atmospheric conditions and the prevalence of low-pressure on the surface of Mars, the existence of liquid water is highly impossible. Further, scientists also emphasize the fact that lake-water having a salinity level five times that of the sea-water can only support life while that having twenty times the salinity of sea-water will not be able to support any life form.
According to the researchers, the presence of a volcano beneath the polar ice-caps in Mars, might be melting them and could be accelerating the formation of such extremely saline lakes. The research has conclusively taken place through the detection of a single sub-surface by using 134 images captured between the year 2012-2019.
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