2024 RT Amination Banner.gif

China Daily

News> World> Content
Friday, January 12, 2018, 10:20
Martian ice deposits could sustain human outposts in the future
By Reuters
Friday, January 12, 2018, 10:20 By Reuters

This NASA file handout image obtained Aug 24, 2017, created on May 21, 2017 at 13:21 local Mars time by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows snow and ice accumulated during Winter covering dunes in the planet's Northern hemisphere.

WASHINGTON - Scientists using images from an orbiting NASA spacecraft have detected eight sites where huge ice deposits near the Martian surface are exposed on steep slopes, a potential source of water that could help sustain future human outposts.

ALSO READ: NASA: Mars 2020 mission performs first supersonic parachute test
While scientists already knew that about a third of the surface of Mars contains shallow ground ice and that its poles harbor major ice deposits, the research published on Thursday described thick underground ice sheets exposed along slopes up to 100 yards (meters) tall at the planet's middle latitudes.
"It was surprising to find ice exposed at the surface at these places. In the mid-latitudes, it's normally covered by a blanket of dust or regolith," loose bits of rock atop a layer of bedrock, said research geologist Colin Dundas of the US Geological Survey's Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona, who led the study.
The latitudes were the equivalent on Earth of Scotland or the tip of South America.

This handout picture released on Dec 19, 2017 by Nature Communication shows Mars through time: Current Mars, red, dead and dry on the left, in contrast with the same landscape covered in water, early in the planet's history, over 3 billion years ago. An explanation for why water disappeared from the surface of Mars shortly after its formation, but remained present on Earth, producing conditions suitable for the evolution of life, is published in this week's Nature. The study suggests that basalts on Mars can hold more water than those on Earth, and that some of the water on Mars may be buried underground. (JON WADE, JAMES MOORE / NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP / AFP)

The researchers used images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has studied the Martian atmosphere and terrain since 2006, including the history of apparent water flows on or near the surface.
The findings showed that ice may be more available than previously known for use as water to support future robotic or human exploration missions, perhaps even the establishment of a permanent Mars base. The water could be used for drinking and potentially conversion into oxygen to breathe.

READ MORE: China's 1st Mars simulation base planned for science, ecotourism
"Humans need water wherever they go, and it's very heavy to carry with you. Previous ideas for extracting human-usable water from Mars were to pull it from the very dry atmosphere or to break down water-containing rocks," said planetary scientist Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, a co-author of the study in the journal Science.
"Here we have what we think is almost pure water ice buried just below the surface. You don't see a high-tech solution," Byrne added. "You can go out with a bucket and shovel and just collect as much water as you need. I think it's sort of a game-changer. It's also much closer to places humans would probably land as opposed to the polar caps, which are very inhospitable."
The deposits were found at seven geological formations called scarps, with slopes up to 55 degrees, in the southern hemisphere and one in the northern hemisphere.
"Our interpretation is that this is consolidated snow deposited in geologically recent times," Dundas said.

Share this story