26/07/2018 (Agence Europe) – According to an article in The Science Daily Journal, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express Space mission has detected a saltwater lake under Mars’ surface spanning about 20km at a depth of 1.5km at the planet's South Pole. The announcement therefore brings to an end more than 30 years of speculation on the existence of liquid lakes on Mars. The discovery was made thanks to the data collected between May 2012 and December 2015 by the 15-year-old Mars Express mission and its MARSIS radar system. This radar was the first of its kind at the time and was financed by the Italian Space Agency and NASA and was developed by the University of Rome in partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Last year, an EU financed programme helped to discover a potentially habitable exo-planet system (see EUROPE 11955, 11732). (PH)