Huge deposits of water were found at the bottom of Valles Marineris, a canyon on Mars.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — A team of scientists using the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) from the European Space Agency (ESA) made an interesting discovery. They found a huge deposit of water at the bottom of Valles Marineris, one of the deepest canyon systems on the planet Mars. It is ten times longer and five times deeper than the Grand Canyon.
The orbiter’s Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument maps the amount of hydrogen in the topsoil covering the surface Mars to a depth of about three feet, and hit the ground. Reported from Futurism, Thursday (16/12), this is an unusual place of water.
Most of the water discoveries on Mars to date have been found near the planet’s polar regions in the form of ice.
“With TGO we can look down to one meter below this dusty layer and see what’s really going on beneath the Martian surface,” said Igor Mitrofanov, researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences and lead author of the study received in the journal Icarus, in a statement. ONE.
“FREND reveals areas of unusually large amounts of hydrogen in the canyon system Valles Marineris colossal. Assuming the hydrogen we see is bound to water molecules, as much as 40 percent of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water,” he added.
This area is really big, about the size of the Netherlands, according to the statement. That size makes it a very promising place to look for more water in the future.
“We found the center of Valles Marineris full of water—much more water than we expected,” said co-author Alexey Malakhov in the statement.
“This is very similar to Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists beneath dry ground due to the constant low temperatures.”
It’s still possible that most of the water deposits are trapped in the minerals, but there’s reason to be optimistic.
“Overall, we think this water is more likely to exist in the form of ice,” argued Malakhov.
“This finding is a great first step, but we need more observations to know exactly what form of water we’re dealing with,” said ESA’s Hakan Svedhem, a co-author on the TGO team.
He said the discovery of a large, not too deep, and easily exploitable reservoir of water in this region of Mars.
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