Scientists say water seen under the polar ice cap on Mars may be an optical illusion UK News

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A new study has found that liquid water once seen beneath the surface of Mars may be an illusion.

Presumably, the liquid was seen under the planet’s ice-covered south pole in 2018.

Scientists saw bright reflections and assumed they were looking at the water under the polar cap.

Image: NASA’s Persevere rover on Mars in August 2021. Pic: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

But new research by the University of Texas says that the temperature and pressure on the planet makes it unlikely that water will be there.

“For water to be sustainable this close to the surface, you need a highly saline environment and a strong locally generated heat source, but that doesn’t match what we know about this region,” said Cyril Grima, a planetary scientist at the university’s Institute of Geophysics.

Scientists suggest that the vision may have been volcanic rock buried under the ice, not water after all.

The researchers tested their theory by seeing how the planet would appear if viewed through a mile of ice.

This allowed them to compare features across the entire planet with those under the polar cap.

Grima noticed the same bright reflections as those seen in 2018, but they were scattered all over the planet, matching the location of the volcanic plains.

Iron-rich lava flows can leave behind rocks with similar reflections, which can be confused with water.

Image: Water sightings are called an illusion, but craters on Mars may still bear signs of life. Pic: NASA/JPL-Caltech

While this may sound like disappointing news, plenty of ice can be found on Mars, and many scientists are excited about further developments in our understanding of the planet.

York University geophysicist Isaac Smith said the “beauty” of the findings is that they “give us really specific places to look for evidence of ancient lakes and riverbeds and to test hypotheses about the broader drought of the Martian climate over billions of years.”

Mr. Smith believes that the bright reflections are due to a type of clay that is made when rocks erode in water.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, is based on three years of data from Marsis, a radar instrument aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft.

Images of the planet from a NASA rover last year confirmed the presence of a lake on the surface fed by a small river about 3.7 billion years ago.

It is hoped that the sediments within Jezero crater contain traces of life.

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