‘Large amounts of water’ were found under the surface of Mars.
a European Space Agency (ESA) E russo space agency Roscosmos’ ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter detected water in the Valles Mainres Valley system.
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in a statementWater was detected using the Precision Neutron Detector Orbital Gas (TGO) Tracker (FREND), which has the ability to detect hydrogen in the planet’s top meter of soil, said the European Space Agency.
“FREND detected an area with an unusually high amount of hydrogen in the huge Valles Marineris Valley system: assuming the hydrogen we see is bound to water molecules, it appears that 40% of the material near the surface in this area is water,” said Igor Mitrofanov, from the Aerospace Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in a statement.
Mitrofanov, principal investigator for the FREND Neutron Telescope, who is also the lead author of the research, Published online November 19 in Icarus.
He and his colleagues analyzed FREND observations from May 2018 to February this year, which determined the soil’s hydrogen content by detecting neutrons instead of light. The process brings greater spatial resolution than previous measurements.
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The area is roughly the size of the Netherlands, according to the European Space Agency, and overlaps the deep valleys of a place called Candor Chaus.
Valles Marineris, located south of the Martian equator, is the largest known valley in the solar system. NASA diz It would extend the distance from New York to California – about 2,000 miles long – and about 20% of the total distance around the Red Planet.
Co-author Alexei Malakhov, also from the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, explained that they believe that water “very likely exists in the form of ice, and not water chemically bound to other minerals in the soil.”
“This discovery is a big first step, but we need more observations to know for sure what water we’re dealing with,” said study co-author Håkan Svedhem of ESEC from ESA in the Netherlands and a former ESA project scientist for the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter said.
While it is already known that there is water on Mars, the European Space Agency has indicated that most of it is found in the planet’s polar regions as cold as ice.
“Knowing more about how and where water exists on Mars today is essential to understanding what happened to the once abundant Martian water and helps us research habitable environments, possible signs of past life and organic matter from the early days of Mars,” he said. Colin Wilson, project scientist for ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.
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