Mars Orbiter Finds Giant Cache of Ice on the Red Planet

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been studying the red planet since 2006, making amazing discoveries the whole time. As a testament to how much there still is to learn about Mars, the MRO just spotted signs of a huge volume of water ice on the planet. Scientists believe this may be the remains of Mars’ long-lost ice caps.

You may be thinking that Mars has ice caps, and it does. That’s on the surface, but the newly discovered reservoir of water is deep beneath the northern ice cap (about 1.2 miles down), uncovered thanks to the radar scanning instruments aboard the NASA spacecraft. Researchers believe this is the third-largest cache of water ice on the red planet.

The team says that were all this ice thawed, it could cover the entire surface of Mars in five feet of water. What makes this discovery exciting aside from the sheer volume is how the ice is packed away inside the planet. The American Geophysical Union, which published the new research based on NASA data, says that radar data from the MRO shows the ice in layers separated by sand (see below). It’s still mostly ice, though. The team estimates water ice makes up 61 to 88 percent of the formation by volume.

Geologists love layers because it provides a way to analyze conditions over time. Analyzing those layers could provide clues as to how the environment on Mars has changed over the eons, which will inform the search for ancient life there. That’s one of the primary objectives of NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 rover.

Knowing where you can get a huge volume of water is also vital to future human exploration of Mars. Bringing everything you’ll need with you adds considerably to the cost of a mission. So-called “in-situ” resources like an ocean’s worth of water you can dig out of the ground can be the difference between a viable mission and an abandoned concept.

That said, the ice discovered by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter isn’t exactly easy to get to. The ice caps covering the cache of water are under the planet’s current ice caps, which are a mix of water and carbon dioxide ice. It might still be more convenient to harvest water ice on Mars than ship it all the way from Earth. That’s especially true if we’re going to set up a human colony on Mars as Elon Musk seems intent to do.

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