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From Windows 98 to Mars 2022: Major Upgrade for 19-Year-Old Martian Water-Spotter - SciTechDaily
Jun 26, 2022 1 min, 58 secs

The MARSIS instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, famous for its role in the discovery of signs of liquid water on the Red Planet, is receiving a major software upgrade that will allow it to see beneath the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in more detail than ever before.

Mars Express was ESA’s first mission to the Red Planet.

The Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument on Mars Express was crucial in the search for and discovery of signs of liquid water on Mars, including a suspected 20-by-30 km (12-by-19 mile) lake of salty water buried under 1.5 km (0.9 miles) of ice in the southern polar region.

By examining the reflected signals, scientists can map the structure below the surface of the Red Planet to a depth of a few kilometers and study properties such as the thickness and composition of its polar ice caps and the properties of volcanic and sedimentary rock layers.

The MARSIS radar instrument on ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft is used to detect features such as water beneath the surface of Mars.

In this graphic, you can see the region on the surface of Mars studied using MARSIS during one pass over the region of Lunae Planum.

The new software was designed together by the INAF team and Carlo, and is now being implemented on Mars Express by ESA.

“There are many regions near the south pole on Mars in which we may have already seen signals indicating liquid water in lower-resolution data,” adds ESA Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson.

“The new software will help us more quickly and extensively study these regions in high resolution and confirm whether they are home to new sources of water on Mars?

It really is like having a brand new instrument on board Mars Express almost 20 years after launch.”.

Old enough to vote in many places on Earth, Mars Express continues to deliver amazing science while remaining one of ESA’s lowest-cost missions to fly.

It was created from data collected by ESA’s Mars Express on April 25, 2022. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

“Mars Express and MARSIS are still very busy,” says James Godfrey, Mars Express spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s ESOC mission operations center in Darmstadt, Germany.

Could the technology be used on this planet for water discovery

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