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The locations come from the Mars Subsurface Water Ice Mapping (SWIM) project, which analyzes historical mission data taken over 20 years of missions to Mars to search for buried ice on the planet. The project examines five different remote sensing datasets collected by the Mars Odyssey orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor.
“Each of our five techniques examines a different sort of proxy or a different way of trying to find signatures of water ice,” says Gareth Morgan, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. And lead author of the short story. study. . These techniques include thermal and geomorphic mapping, which looks for surface geological changes caused by ice that is less than five meters below the surface.
Morgan and his team found a few places that would appear to work perfectly in the northern hemisphere, namely the flat lowlands of Arcadia Planitia in mid to upper latitudes and the ice networks across Deuteronilus Mensae further east and slightly to the south. South. The first is an ancient region of ancient volcanic flows, with a suspected history of massive snowfall dating back tens of millions of years. The new results seem to suggest that these deposits slowly moved underground to very shallow depths that could be easy to drill.
USGS
Meanwhile, Deuteronilus Mensae is home to modern glaciers and exists between the cratered highlands to the south and the low plains to the north. The ice here is effectively the remains of what were probably larger glacial structures in the past. It must be located either under a thin layer of 2 meters of Martian soil and rocks, or under a very porous material a few meters thick. In either case, the ice there would be fairly accessible to the colonists of Mars.
This first round of analysis was funded by NASA only to focus on the northern hemisphere of Mars. Morgan believes it’s because there are great plains in the area that would make it easier for a spacecraft to land on the surface. But he and Putzig would also like to pursue a more in-depth analysis of underground ice deposits in the southern hemisphere.
“Making this work open to the community capitalizes on all the expertise available, both inside and outside of NASA,” explains Leslie Gertsch, geological engineer at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, who did not participate in the study. “The next step is to equip future missions with better ice mapping capability – from 0.5 to 15 meters below the surface, a depth range accessible by remote mining techniques.
NASA is already prospecting for water ice on the moon. How difficult it is to go to Mars (the launch window is only every two years), it is worth thinking about it much sooner.
“The scarcity of sufficiently detailed underground data, even on Earth, is the reason why mining is always a gamble,” says Gertsch. “Yet it is necessary for humanity to survive elsewhere.”
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