Cold Blue Gas Giant And One Of It's Asteroid Moons.

Mars Express finds evidence of liquid water under Martian pole

A ground-penetrating radar aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite has found evidence for a pool of liquid water, a potentially habitable environment, buried under layers of ice and dust at the red planet’s south pole.

“This subsurface anomaly on Mars has radar properties matching water or water-rich sediments,” said Roberto Orosei, principal investigator of the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument, or MARSIS, lead author of a paper in the journal Science describing the discovery.

The conclusion is based on observations of a relatively small area of Mars, but “it is an exciting prospect to think there could be more of these underground pockets of water elsewhere, yet to be discovered,” added Orosei.

Scientists have long theorised the presence of subsurface pools under the martian poles where the melting point of water could be decreased due to the weight of overlying layers of ice. The presence of salts in the Martian soil also would act to reduce the melting point and, perhaps, keep water liquid even at sub-freezing temperatures.

Earlier observations by MARSIS were inconclusive, but researchers developed new techniques to improve resolution and accuracy.

“We’d seen hints of interesting subsurface features for years but we couldn’t reproduce the result from orbit to orbit, because the sampling rates and resolution of our data was previously too low,” said Andrea Cicchetti, MARSIS operations manager.

“We had to come up with a new operating mode to bypass some onboard processing and trigger a higher sampling rate and thus improve the resolution of the footprint of our dataset. Now we see things that simply were not possible before.”

MARSIS works by firing penetrating radar beams at the surface of Mars and then measuring the strength of the signals as they are reflected back to the spacecraft.

The data indicating water came from a 200-kilometre-wide (124-mile-wide) area that shows the south polar region features multiple layers of ice and dust down to a depth of about 1.5 kilometres (0.9 miles). A particularly bright reflection below the layered deposits can be seen in a zone measuring about 20 kilometres (12 miles) across.

Orosei’s team interprets the bright reflection as the interface between overlying ice and a pool or pond of liquid water. The pool must be at least several centimetres thick for the MARSIS instrument to detect it.

“The long duration of Mars Express, and the exhausting effort made by the radar team to overcome many analytical challenges, enabled this much-awaited result, demonstrating that the mission and its payload still have a great science potential,” says Dmitri Titov, ESA’s Mars Express project scientist.

The discovery is significant because it raises the possibility, at least, of potentially habitable sub-surface environments.

“Some forms of microbial life are known to thrive in Earth’s subglacial environments, but could underground pockets of salty, sediment-rich liquid water on Mars also provide a suitable habitat, either now or in the past?” ESA asked in a statement. “Whether life has ever existed on Mars remains an open question.”

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Purple Skies

Picture of the Day - November 4, 2018

The surface of a large moon orbiting a gas giant that has an unusual purple-tinted atmosphere. The moon has diatomic sulfur in the upper atmosphere producing the purple hue.

Picture of the Day - February 11, 2019 (Late post)

Blue ice giant with blue rings.

For more beautiful space aesthetics visit calypsoskelper.tumblr.com

Picture of the Day - January 15, 2019

Titan-like world with methane oceans and clouds of hydrocarbons.

Lonely Moon

Picture of the Day - October 19, 2018

Small moon passing in front of a large Super-Earth type planet.

Triangulum Log - Post 5 - The Vista System (Planet 4)

The Vista System’s 4th and outermost planet. This dry cold desert world orbits 1.45 AU from the sun. It is the system’s only super-earth type planet with a mass of 4.37 times that of Earth, and a diameter of 11,656 kilometers (1.82 Earth’s). It is surrounded by a dark-gray ring system, likely a shattered satellite that got too close. The atmosphere is thin and dry, composed primarily of carbon dioxide and smaller quantities of ammonia and methane. The surface is cold with a global average temperature of -94° F

A single large satellite orbits close to the planet. The moon has a radius of 1,091 kilometers and a mass one-quarter that of Earth’s moon.

High Resolution Pics

Image 1 - Planet 4

Image 2 - Dusty world

Image 3 - The wastelands

Image 4 - Endless Sand

Image 5 - A glimpse of home. The Milky Way, and Magellanic Cloud Galaxies.

Image 6 - Faint rings

Image 7 - The Lone companion

Image 8 - Dead world

Image 9 - Conjunction

Image 10 - Pre-eclipse

Picture of the Day - January 6, 2019

Ringed ice giant orbiting a star located near a beautiful red-colored nebula.

Space Engine System ID: RS 8550-3584-8-657793-464 5 to visit the planet in Space Engine.

PS: I apologize for the inconsistency of pictures lately. Personal issues are making my regular post schedule something erratic.

Split Moon. –outerspaceclothing.com–