The Mars Express orbiter detected enough water ice buried beneath Mars’ equator to cover the entire planet in a shallow ocean if it melted.
A European Space Agency (ESA) probe has found enough water to cover Mars in oceans between 4.9 and 8.9 feet (1.5 and 2.7 meters) deep, buried in dusty ice beneath the equator the planet.
The discovery was made by ESA’s Mars Express mission, a veteran spacecraft that has been involved in science operations around Mars for 20 years.
While this is not the first time evidence of ice has been found near the Red Planet’s equator, this new discovery is by far the largest amount of water ice detected there so far and appears to match previous discoveries of frozen water on Mars.
“Interestingly, the radar signals match what we expect from ice sheets and are similar to the signals we see from Mars’ polar layers, which we know are very rich in ice,” said lead researcher Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. United States in the ESA statement.
The deposits are thick, extending 3.7 km (2.3) miles underground, and are topped with layers of hardened ash and dry dust hundreds of meters thick.
The ice is not a pure block but is heavily contaminated with dust.
While being near the equator is a more accessible location for future manned missions, being buried so deep means it will be difficult to access the icy water.
About 15 years ago, Mars Express detected deposits beneath a geological formation called the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF), but scientists weren’t sure what the deposits contained.
The geography of Mars is divided between the northern highlands and the southern lowlands, and a large 5,000 km long MMF lies near the border between the two.
It is suspected that MMF itself was formed in the last 3 billion years from lava flows and was covered in volcanic ash in ancient times when Mars was still volcanically active.
Currently, the MMF is covered by piles of dust several kilometers high.
MMF is actually the source of the most abundant dust on the entire planet, which fuels the giant dust storms that can hit Mars every season.
2024-01-18 23:54:00
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