The MARSIS antenna was deployed successfully in June 2005 after a series of glitches. It works by sending radio pulses towards the Red Planet and then analysing the time delay and strength of the pulses that bounce back. The radio waves that penetrate the surface rebound when they encounter a sub-surface boundary between materials with different electrical properties - such as rock and water.
But aside from one Apollo 17 radar experiment on the Moon in 1972 - which yielded mixed results - the technique had never been tested.
The most exciting part of this experiment is simply "that it works", says MARSIS co-leader Jeff Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US.
William T K Johnson, MARSIS manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, agrees. "This is very experimental," he says. "We wondered - can we see anything in the subsurface? The answer to that is yes."
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