“We found that the rocky surface of Mars is not bending under the load of the north polar ice cap,” said Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
“This implies that the planet’s interior is more rigid, and thus colder, than we thought before,” said Phillips, the lead author of the report appearing in the online version of the journal Science.
He suggested that any liquid that might exist below the planet’s surface and any possible organisms living there, would be located deeper than scientists had suspected.
Shallow Radar
The discovery was made using the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has provided the most detailed pictures to date of the interior layers of ice, sand and dust that make up the north polar cap on Mars.
“In our first glimpses inside the polar ice using the radar on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we can clearly see stacks of icy material that trace the history of Mars’ climate,” said co-author of the paper Jeffrey Plaut, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
On May 25, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled to touch down not far from the north polar ice cap. It will further probe the history of water on Mars, and is expected to get a close look at ice on the planet, the ScienceDailyonline said.
Spinning star
Melbourne, PTI: Astronomers are puzzled by the discovery of a strange fast-spinning pulsar (nuetron stars) in an elongated orbit around an apparent Sun-like star, pushing scientists to figure out how this unique system was produced.
Located about 21,000 light years from Earth, the pulsar, a city-sized superdense stellar corpse left over after a massive star exploded as a supernova, is spinning on its axis 465 times every second. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.
“Our ideas about how the fastest-spinning pulsars are produced do not predict either the kind of orbit or the type of companion star this one has,” said David Champion of the Australia Telescope National Facility.
