Water on Mars? Let's use a divining rod to find it...

Science says that water is essential for life. So most of man's recent ventures into space has centered around finding water (or the proof that it once existed) on a planet or its moon. NASA has recently focused its attention on Mars, with the famous rover missions and many more to come, cumulating in a (possible) manned mission.

Europe's Space Agency, the ESA, also sent out a probe to check Mars, and it is going to deploy a high-tech "diving rod" to find out if there is any underground water on Mars. Hehe... maybe they will find not only underground water, but underground structures as well... where maybe they will find "giant-cat-like" creatures, strangely limping around like they were somehow lame...

Here's the quote from the article:

A "divining rod" to search for underground water on Mars will be deployed on Europe's Mars Express spacecraft in the first week of May 2005, after a year of delays.

Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding - or MARSIS - consists of wires strung inside three long fibreglass tubes. These will seek water - which might provide oases for life - as deep as several kilometres below the Martian surface.

The tubes, currently folded and stored onboard Mars Express, were originally scheduled for deployment in April 2004. But mission managers postponed the date when computer simulations showed that a similar antenna planned for launch later in 2005 could swing back and damage the spacecraft upon deployment. So the MARSIS team spent several months last autumn running vacuum-chamber tests of the antenna material and modelling the deployment on computers.

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