Jakarta – An area on Mars is thought to contain a large amount of water trapped beneath its surface. The location, known as the Valles Marineris valley system, has the potential to be very useful for future astronauts.
Valles Marineris is far from the first location researchers have seen water on Mars. If it used to be concentrated in the polar regions and deep inside Mars, the latest findings of potential water sources are at the equator and are relatively more accessible.
Igor Mitrofanov of the Russian Institute for Space Research and colleagues used data from the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter probe, which has been orbiting Mars since 2016. From this data, Igor discovered something unusual: high levels of hydrogen at shallow depths.
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Igor and his team used an instrument called the Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector onboard the TGO orbiter to detect changes in neutron emission levels on the Martian surface. They found a reduction in the number of neutrons at a location called Candor Chaos in Valles Marineris which indicated the presence of large amounts of hydrogen.
As also noted in a paper to be published in the March 2022 issue of the Journal of Icarus, it is presumed that 40 percent of the subsurface layer at the site is water.
While the research team couldn’t tell whether the hydrogen content was in the form of water ice or locked in hydrated minerals, its unusually high content indicated at least some of it was water ice. “Even if it’s bound in minerals, it’s still accessible,” said Collin Wilson, a researcher on the TGO project at the European Space Agency, but not a member of Igor’s research team.
Wilson adds, “If you take some of those minerals and put them in the oven on your plane, it’s going to be very easy to get water out of there.”
The location of the depth of the hydrogen content is estimated to be only two meters below the surface and can be reached with the robotic drill of Rosalind Franklin’s rover. The robot belonging to the European Space Agency is planned to launch into Mars on a mission with Russia in 2022.
Rosalind Franklin is currently not scheduled to undertake a mission to Candor Chaos, but the alleged location of the easily accessible water content makes it an attractive destination candidate for future Mars rover robots equipped with drill bits.
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