Washington, DC, USA: After deciphering the unexplained bright radar signals from ESA's Mars Express MARSIS, scientists questioned the presence of water at Mars' south polar cap for years (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding).
Many scientists were convinced that there was water on Mars, but this was not the case for everyone. Now, a recent study led by Aditya Kumar Khuller, a NASA scientist at JPL, and his colleague Jeffrey Plaut has completely dismissed the concept of water's presence, citing the low temperature as the reason.
“We do not believe that the bright subsurface reflectors represent liquid water,” Aditya Kumar Khuller told SYFY WIRE, “because liquid water would require abnormally large quantities of heat to remain stable at these locations.”
“In addition, there are some spots where the bright reflectors reach close to the surface, when the temperature is too low for even brines to be stable in liquid form,” Khuller noted.
Researchers needed a freezing environment similar to that found on Mars' south polar cap to verify the new notion, which was made possible by Issac Smith of York University in Canada, who used smectite samples to demonstrate the hypothesis.