Mars Express 'divining rod' to deploy

12:43 07 February 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Maggie McKee

A "divining rod" to search for underground water on Mars will be deployed on Europe's Mars Express spacecraft early this spring, after a year of delays. The new deployment date for the radar antenna - to be announced within days - is likely to fall in April 2005.

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 rest here: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6974

BTW, Tom Matula wrote this of the above article...

Once again, what will MRO teach us about Mars that Mars Express is not already doing? With budgets so tight one way for NASA to save a couple of billion would be to scrape the Mars robots for now and reconfigure MRO to serve as a LRO... more here: http://www.space-frontier.org/cgi-bin/BBS/MoonBase/read/12922

I would suggest dropping the Moon nonsense of LRO and landers would save more and make as much sense.