A European Mars orbiter has found water ice in the heart of the Valles Marineris canyon system- an area about the size of the Netherlands
- Water ice may be lying just centimetres below the Martian surface at one of the planet’s most well known sites the Valles Marineris, a huge 3.000-km-long canyon system located along the equator of Mars.
- Ten times longer and five times deeper than the Grand Canyon on Earth, the Valles Marineris is named after NASA’s Mariner 9 Mars orbiter, which discovered it in 1971.
- Now, 50 years later, the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has identified vast amounts of hydrogen in the soil’s upper surface layers at the centre of the canyon.
- Alexey Malakhov, a senior scientist at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the nine authors of a new paper on the subject, says “We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water-far more water than we expected. This is very much like Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures”
- Researchers added that if all of the hydrogen they have detected is present in the form of water ice, the compound could make up as much as 40% of near-surface material in the area.
Picture Credit : Google
