The Mars Express mission, one of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) most successful missions, is getting a software upgrade. 19 years after its debut, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument on the Mars Express is getting an upgrade. Thanks to this big software improvement, it will be able to see under the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in better detail. The MARSIS device is well-known for its contribution to the quest for liquid water on Mars. Mars Express was the ESA’s first mission to the Red Planet.
According to an ESA press release, Andrea Cicchetti, MARSIS Deputy Principal Investigator and Operation Manager at INAF, who led the upgrade development, “After decades of fruitful science and having gained a good understanding of Mars, we wanted to push the instrument’s performance beyond some of the limitations required when the mission began.”
MARSIS searches for water on Mars and learns more about its atmosphere by using low-frequency radio waves that reflect off the planet’s surface. The update includes a variety of enhancements that improve signal reception and on-board data processing in order to boost the quantity and quality of research data returned to Earth. The instrument’s 130-foot antenna can scan three miles underneath Mars’ surface.