Beneath the characteristic reddish layer of Mars is an almost pure ice sheet about 90 meters thick and up to 170 meters thick on the plains of Utopia and Arcadia. The study, led by Colin M. Dundas of the US Geological Survey (USGS), confirms through analysis, the existence of large amounts of liquid frozen at shallow depth. This finding, published in the journal Science , offers us a more promising vision for future manned missions to the red planet, since it could be easy to extract water or even the hypothetical terraforming of Mars .
Planetary scientists located eight fractures on the surface of Mars. An analysis of these fractures revealed for the first time how much water ice is below the surface and how deep the ice appears to be.
“We have found a new window to study in ice, which we hope will be of interest to those interested in all aspects of Mars and its history,” says Colin Dundas, leader of the work.
It is not something new to speak of ice on Mars. In 2001, the spaceshipMars Odysseycame to the planet and began snooping for ice chemical signatures. Since then we have found many traces. Without going any further, in 2016, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter located under the terrain of the red planet water ice, enough to fill Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes in North America.
Thanks to the more detailed recognition carried out by theMars Reconnaissance Orbiter,Scientists were able to locate the exposed ice in small craters, glaciers and Martian ice sheets. “High-resolution data has vastly improved our understanding of various ice-related landforms“Dundas clarifies.
The images have a bluish color, which indicates an ice sub-layer. According to experts, frozen areas are unlikely to be a mix of water and soil. “If the conclusions of the article are correct, you are seeing something that is almost pure ice,” says Dundas. In addition, it is observed that the ice is retreating in the places where it is exposed, at a rate of a few millimeters per year.
The fractures exist throughout the planet’s mid-latitudes, ruling out glaciers that migrated from the poles. The study authors propose thatThese ice sheets were formed when thick snow covered Mars over a period of a few thousand years.There is no doubt about its presence, as the ice signature persists during the summer.
“ If we were to send humans to live on Mars for a substantial period of time, it would be a fantastic water source, ” says Matt Balme, a planetary scientist at the Open University (UK), who was not involved in the study.
It is clear that if this is so, the astronauts would have a vital raw material right next to the camp. All you would have to do is go to the fracture with a hammer and collect chunks of Martian ice.
Much more than ice
The exposed ice has vital scientific value aside from its potential magnitude of resource because it preserves evidence about long-term patterns in the climate of Mars . The tilt of the axis of rotation of Mars varies much more than that of Earth in rates of millions of years. Today, the inclinations of the two planets are more or less the same. At a greater inclination of Mars, climatic conditions can favor the accumulation of ice in middle latitudes.
This research benefited from the coordinated use of multiple instruments on the Mars orbiters, plus the Mars archive that now exceeds 11 years for the MRO spacecraft and 16 years for the Odyssey probe.
Referencia: C.M. Dundas at U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, AZ el al., “Exposed subsurface ice sheets in the Martian mid-latitudes,” Science (2018). science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6372/199 DOI: 10.1126/science.aao1619
Image of the ice sheet near the surface.
