"The exotic salts that we know exist on Mars have amazing 'antifreeze' properties allowing brines to remain liquid down to -103 degrees Fahrenheit", he explained. "We studied these salts in our lab to understand how they would respond to radar".
"My Italian colleagues reached out to see if my laboratory experiment data would support the presence of liquid water beneath the Martian ice cap", Stillman explained. "The research showed that we don't have to have lakes of perchlorate and chloride brines, but that these brines could exist between the grains of ice or sediments and are enough to exhibit a strong dielectric response. This is similar to how seawater saturates grains of sand at the shoreline or how flavouring permeates a slushie, but at -103 degrees Fahrenheit below a mile of ice near the South Pole of Mars".