24 January 2004	Saturday	01 Zilhaj 1424

DARMSTADT, Jan 23: Data relayed from Europe's mission to Mars gave dramatic backing on Friday to theories that the Red Planet was once awash with water, one of the precious ingredients for life.

First results from the unmanned spacecraft Mars Express sketched the vision of a planet whose surface was once sculpted by seas and glaciers and confirms indications that its South Pole is capped by frozen water.

That boosts hopes that big reserves of ice may lie beneath the surface, providing fuel and sustenance for a future manned mission, European Space Agency (ESA) officials said.

The agency's scientists were cock-a-hoop, for the instrument-packed orbiter only took up position off Mars on Dec 25 and the mission was struggling to overcome the disappearance of a small lander, Beagle 2.

"We have identified water ice on the South Pole," ESA scientist Vittorio Formisano, declared. The ice is not covered by frozen carbon dioxide (CO2), unlike the Martian North Pole, where US spacecraft have detected a mixture of CO2 and frozen water. And, said astrophycist Jean-Pierre Bibring, every indication was that the newly-found ice was year-round and did not come and go with the Martian summer and winter.

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, in March 2002, gave strong indications that there was water ice on the southern pole. It used a gammma ray spectrometer, which detected hydrogen, which with oxygen makes up water.

Mars Express' data amounts to a confirmation, for it arrives at the same conclusion but by a different technique: a spectrometer that analyses visible and infrared light rather than the gamma part of the energy spectrum.

Its instrument, Omega, uses as its source sunlight that is reflected from the planet's surface and atmosphere. Other images sent back by Mars Express add meat to skeletal evidence that billions of years ago Mars was awash with water.

But as the planet cooled, the surface water froze or evaporated into space through a thinning atmosphere, the theory goes. However, some may have remained frozen in the soil or trapped in underground reservoirs, as well as at the poles, according to this notion.

High-resolution images taken by a sophisticated camera of 1.87 million square kilometers (0.75 million sq. miles) "confirms the former occurrence and erosional activity" of water on the Martian surface, said ESA scientist Gerhard Neukum.

A large crater, Hecates Tholus, also showed signs of past glaciation, he said. Liquid water is of far more interest to biologists than ice. It is at the right temperature at which some elements dissolve and react, helping to create the process for initiating and sustaining life.

One theory holds that if there is subsurface ice, heat from the planet's core may be warm enough to keep some of that water in liquid form. This would explain intriguing gullies and valleys that have been interpreted as being recently formed by water. But there is no conclusion yet as to whether Mars is still geothermally active.

Alternatively, ice that is close to the surface might be melted by climate change or by seasonal factors. If the ice lies just below the surface in latitudes close to the equator, it could melt during the Martian summer, according to this speculation.

Mars Express Flight Director Mike McKay said the southern polar icecap extended down to about 80 degrees latitude, which meant it was not very big. But, he said, "This [finding] strengthens hope of finding subterranean ice and even liquid water on the surface of Mars."-AFP