Mars Express

Well, uh, that's certainly true.

Uh, but Mars Express, when was it launched? It's probably about 20 years ago, I think.

Um-

Oh.

So that is pretty, uh, legacy technology, I think you'd say.

Yeah.

Uh, and imagine what you could do now, given that the high-resolution cameras aboard, um, aboard Mars Express are probably only comparable, uh, with the cameras that are in our smartphones, rather than being comparable with the camera that's on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's telescope, uh, which is the size of a bus.

[laughs]

Researchers Bruce Jakofsky and Christopher Edwards didn't just guess.

They analyzed years of high fidelity data from orbiting spacecraft, specifically the MAVEN probe and the Mars Express.

OK.

And what were those probes looking at?

Well, MAVEN has been sitting in orbit analyzing the Martian upper atmosphere, tracking exactly how isotopes of carbon and oxygen are currently bleeding out into space.

Right.

Meanwhile, Mars Express used ground-penetrating radar to map the exact depth and volume of the polar ice caps.

So they were basically able to run a planetary inventory of every single ounce of carbon dioxide left on the entire planet?

Exactly.

Spacecraft like the European Space Agency's Mars Express and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, these machines have literally spent the last two decades acting as our incredibly powerful eyes in the sky.

Yeah.

They're tirelessly mapping, photographing in high resolution, and analyzing the chemical makeup of the surface, basically proving year after year that there are always new lessons to be learned.

They're the, they're the, the, the sort of little gentle, uh, uh, impressions in, in a landscape which are made by flowing water, which always wants to go downhill, uh, and eventually you carve out a river valley.

Um, but as you say, uh, some of the early observations, I think with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, with, uh, Mars Express, um, those two v- venerable, uh, orbiting spacecraft, it was quickly realized that these things change on a seasonal basis.

Uh, and that was why, uh, the thinking was that maybe there's, uh, enough water to do it.

However- Um, it turns out that you get these gullies in regions of Mars where the temperature never gets high enough for liquid water to exist on the surface.

Uh, it's just not possible for liquid water to exist, uh, in some of these regions.

But they did actually go even a step further.

They, they, uh, looked, um, uh, in, in this-- uh, from, from the data from Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, they looked at the spectrum of some of these, uh, m- at melting ice fields where, where you, y- you know, you're looking really near the poles, uh, of Mars where some of these gullies are.

And they found, um, there's no, uh, s- no signature for water.

But perhaps the coolest recent discovery is this giant underground lake I mentioned at the start of the episode.

At the end of July, the European Space Agency announced that this lake was discovered using radar reflections from the MARSIS instrument on the Mars Express Orbiter.

This is the same way we map the ocean, by analyzing radio waves reflected from layers below the surface, and the MARSIS radar revealed a boundry-

College football is back, so Hilton called in me, the Superstition Concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality.

It's crazy.

Or we had also Mars Express, or still having that, where, where there's a lot of ground trips around Mars.

Um, and then there's, there's the research for dark matter with Euclid, which started, I think, two years ago, which is crazy to i- to, to research these dark matter and dark energy things.

Oh, and isn't Europe also with the Columbus module on the ISS?

So let's see.

The public goods and the research is quite good.

You know, we have named these great, um, projects like, uh, Euclid or Mars Express or Copernicus, Galileo.

Yeah.