The water-rich area in the Valles Mariners is about the size of the Netherlands, scientists say (The Netherlands has an area of 41,543 square km – editor’s note). Specifically, the underwater areas overlap with the deep Candor Chasma valleys, a site that is part of the Valles Mariners canyon system.
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| Valles Marineris (Latin Mariner Valley; named after the Mariner 9 probe that discovered it) is the largest known system of canyons in the Solar System located on Mars. |
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The team of researchers believes that the water found on the site is in the form of ice.
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View of the Candor Chasma valley
Photo: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The water hiding beneath the surface of Mars was found by the FREND (Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector) telescope on the TGO satellite, which maps hydrogen from the planet’s orbit – a sign of the presence of water – in Martian soil.
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Subsurface “oases”
Although water is known to exist on Mars, most are located in the cold polar regions of the planet as ice, not in liquid form. Water ice is not on the surface near the equator because the temperatures here are not low enough to be stable.
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Thus, there may be more water supplies inside our neighboring planet than we thought, the European Space Agency (ESA) notes in its report.
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TGO maps the water-rich region of the Valles Marineris.
Photo: I. Mitrofanov et al. (2021)
“With TGO, we can look up to one meter below this dusty layer and see what’s really going on beneath the surface of Mars – and especially locate water-rich ‘oases’ that couldn’t be detected by previous instruments,” said Igor Mitrofanov, lead author of the new study. Institute of Space Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
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“FREND has revealed an area of unusually large amounts of hydrogen in the colossal system of the Valles Marineris canyons. Assuming that the hydrogen we see is bound to water molecules, it seems that up to 40 percent of the material just below the surface in this area is water, ”he added.
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An older image of the Valles Marineris region of Mars
Photo: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Postponement of the next stage
It should be recalled that Roskosmos and ESA announced last March that they were postponing the start of the second phase of the joint ExoMars mission for two years due to a pandemic: sending a robotic vehicle to explore Mars. Originally, a special rover was supposed to go to Mars last summer.
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The vehicle will be the second stage of a program of joint research by European and Russian scientists on the red planet. The first started in March 2016, when the Trace Gas Orbiter satellite with the Schiaparelli module went to Mars.
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While the TGO apparatus settled successfully in the planned orbit after six months, the module, which was to conduct a surface survey, broke when the landing failed.
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Volcano and flying on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance Perseverance is currently searching for traces of past, not present, life on Mars. In addition, this vehicle is the first spacecraft to record the sounds of the red planet. Above all, however, the rover began to uncover the secrets of the Martian crater Lake, where it landed.
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Apparently he proved that the crater was indeed a lake before. All the clues found so far suggest that life could once have been on Mars, resp. suitable conditions for its preservation. Crater Lake on the planet is now an inhospitable frozen desert. However, thanks to a study of current photographs from the probe, scientists believe that 3.7 billion years ago, the area was full of water and could contain life.
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In addition, this robotic explorer has now uncovered traces of ancient volcanic activity on Mars. The latest finding of the rover suggests that the bedrock it has traversed since landing was once formed by, among other things, volcanic lava flows. It is thus created from the remains of Martian magma. According to scientists, this is “completely unexpected,” the CNN news agency wrote.
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At first, the layered rocks photographed by Perseverance were thought to be sedimentary. The rocks that the rover has removed so far have also declassified that they have interacted with water several times, and some of them contain organic molecules. These discoveries could help create an accurate timeline for the events that took place in Lake Crater.
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There is also a small helicopter on Mars. The American helicopter Ingenuity, with its recent 17th flight, overcame the 30-minute milestone, which it has flown in its thin air since landing on Mars in February. This was reported by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
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The Ingenuity helicopter is 18 years old in the atmosphere of Mars. This flight lasted about 125 seconds and the helicopter traveled 230 meters. The place of landing is the northern boundary of the South Séítah area. In total, Ingenuity had flown for 33 minutes and 10 seconds and covered a distance of 3820 meters. pic.twitter.com/laJtm4IIug
– Michal Vaclavik (@Kosmo_Michal) December 16, 2021
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At the moment, however, the Ingenuity has been in the atmosphere of Mars for 18 years. “This flight lasted about 125 seconds and the helicopter traveled 230 meters. The place of landing is the northern boundary of the South Séítah area. In total, Ingenuity has flown for 33 minutes and 10 seconds and covered a distance of 3820 meters, “described space specialist Michal Václavík from the Czech Space Office.
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According to JPL, for example, the device has already been able to ascend to a height of 12 meters or fly at speeds of up to five meters per second.
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Chinese spacecraft in orbit
China’s Tien-wen 1 orbital spacecraft, which has recently successfully changed its orbiting position around Mars, is also currently operating in Mars orbit to improve remote sensing of the red planet.
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The entire Chinese Tiananmen 1 mission with the probe, which consists of the so-called orbiter (orbiting satellite), lander (landing module) and rover (reconnaissance robotic vehicle), was launched on July 23, 2020 with the launch of a rocket from Earth. A rover named Chuung descended from his landing pad to the surface of Mars on May 22 this year.
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