Astronomers want to know everything about the planets in our solar system and one of the most interesting places is Mars. If they already can map the surface, it has been very hard to get information about the underground. There is one technology that can complete this task - it’s MARSIS, EPA’s Mars Express radar sounder.
MARSIS stands for Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding and it managed to take a look under the Mars’ surface which means that it opened to a new world of planetary exploration, the third dimension world.
The success of MARSIS was a surprise even for its developers as they stated that this was an experiment as nobody used a radar sounder on other planets before. Ali Safaeinili, MARSIS co-investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California, USA said that “it was a leap into the unknown” and Roberto Orosei, MARSIS Deputy Principal Investigator, IASF-INAF, added that they “demonstrated that the polar caps at Mars are mostly water ice, and produced an inventory so now we know exactly how much water there is”.
MARSIS is a result of the collaboration between Europe and America and this technology could be helpful here on Earth in order to find more about Antarctica’s ice sheets.
