Technology that was developed to explore the subsurface of Mars is now being used by a NASA-led team to search for water beneath the remote Kuwait desert. A team led by research scientist Essam Heggy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently traveled to Northern Kuwait to map out the depth and extent of aquifers in barren environments using an airborne sounding radar prototype.
Using a Sounding Radar
The team, which would include several personnel from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR), will be using a 40-megahertz, low-frequency sounding radar provided by the California Institute of Technology.
How They Do It
A helicopter equipped with the radar has recently completed 12 low-altitude passes over two areas known to contain freshwater aquifers. Researchers have said that the missions have successfully demonstrated that the radar is able to locate subsurface aquifers, probe variations in the depth of the water table, as well as pinpoint locations where water flowed into and out of these aquifers.
According to NASA, the radar is super sensitive to changes in electrical characteristics of subsurface rock, sediments, and water- saturated soils. Zones of water saturation are highly reflective and mirror the low-frequency radar signal. The returning radar echoes will explore the thick mixture of gravel, sand, and silt that will cover most of Kuwait's northern desert and will lie above its water table.
Sharing Similar Characteristics
The radar sounding prototype has a lot of similarities in terms of its characteristics with two other instruments flying on the Mars-orbiting spacecraft: the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), on the European Space Agency's Mars Express, and Shallow Radar (SHARAD), on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Both these instruments have also found evidence of ice in the Martian subsurface, but currently have not yet detected any liquid water whatsoever. The Kuwait results may lead to revised interpretations of data from these two instruments.
