AKURAT.CO Planet Mars turns out to have its own Grand Canyon. The massive canyon also holds much of the water found by orbiters circling the red planet, according to the European Space Agency.
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter was launched in 2016 to carry out a joint mission between the European Space Agency and Roscosmos. The mission was aimed at detecting water in Valles Marineris, Mars. This canyon system is 10 times longer, 5 times deeper, and 20 times wider than the Grand Canyon.
The water is below the surface of the canyon system and detected by the Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) orbiting device. The device is capable of mapping hydrogen at the top of 1 meter of Martian soil.
Most of the water on Mars is in the planet’s polar regions and remains frozen as ice. Valles Marineris itself is just south of the planet’s equator. The temperature there is usually not cold enough to sustain the ice.
The orbiter also collected observations in May 2018-February 2021. Previously, other orbiters had searched for water below the Martian surface and detected a small amount of water under the Martian dust. The findings were published Wednesday (15/12) in the journal Icarus.
“With the Orbiter Gas Tracker, we were able to see up to 1 meter below this dusty layer and observe beneath the Martian surface. Most importantly, we were able to find a water-rich ‘oasis’ that could not be detected with previous devices,” said Igor Mitrofanov, principal investigator of the telescope. neutron FREND.
According to him, FREND revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system.
“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.”
To illustrate, this area is roughly the size of the Netherlands. The area overlaps with Candor Chaos, a network of valleys within the canyon system. The FREND device also searches for neutrons to map the hydrogen content in Martian soil.
“We can deduce how much water is on the ground by looking at the neutrons it emits,” said Alexey Malakhov, senior scientist at the Institute for Space Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
This is because neutrons are produced when high-energy particles known as ‘galactic cosmic rays’ hit Mars. Even drier soils emit more neutrons than moister ones.
“We found that the center of Valles Marineris was filled with water, much more than we anticipated. This is very similar to Earth’s ‘permafrost’ regions, where water ice permanently persists beneath dry ground due to the constant low temperatures,” he added.
Meanwhile, temperatures near the Martian equator are higher, so the research team believes there must be some kind of special mix of conditions that allows water to survive and refill.
“These findings demonstrate the capabilities of the orbiting instruments that allow us to see below the Martian surface and reveal the presence of large, not very deep, and easily exploitable water reservoirs in the Martian region,” said Hakan Svedhem, co-author of the study and former scientist for the orbiter project.
Future Mars missions will land at lower latitudes. The findings at Valles Marineris also confirm that there are interesting places for humans to explore in the future, especially as this water will be much more accessible than previously discovered subsurface water sources.
“Knowing more about how and where water is on Mars today is critical to understanding what happened to the once-abundant Martian water. It helps us search for habitable environments, possible signs of past life, and organic material from the past.” – the early days of Mars,” said Colin Wilson, the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter project scientist.[]
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