The chances are that now that a body of liquid water has been found on Mars for the first time, those who have been itching to live on the planet will start to make arrangements in earnest for what would be an unheard of inter-planetary move. The discovery has simply shown that Mars could sustain life.
This was how the discovery was made. Using radar on board a craft known as the Mars Express, Italian scientists had surveyed the southern ice cap. The radar was able to send pulses that penetrated beneath the ground and bounced back, bringing information about the sub-surface geology.
A mile underground, they also found a sharp change — stretching along a length of about 13 miles. This change was exactly the same profile as is found beneath the Antarctic and Greenlandic ice caps, where it corresponds to subglacial lakes.
Commenting on the discovery, Alan Duffy, of Swinburne University in Australia, said :
''This is a stunning result that suggests water on Mars is not a temporary trickle like previous discoveries but a persistent body of water that provides the conditions for life for extended periods of time.''
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