Scientists Discover A Large Supply Of Frozen Water In Mars Found At The Bottom Of Its Grand Canyon

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Earth is known as the blue planet because most of the planet is covered in water. This is where life thrive because animals cannot survive without it. For years now, astronomers have also looked into other planets to see if these can be inhabited by people.

Right now, the closest planet to earth is Mars. Scientists hypothesized that Mars was once covered with huge bodies of water, and while now it’s quite dry, these experts have discovered something found at the bottom of the planet’s Grand Canyon.

Hence, the scientists who have taken a peek into the depths of Mars’ own grand canyon have discovered something stunning and wonderful. They saw that water makes up as much as 40 percent of the ground there. This is a respectable amount when they thought about how it was close to the hot dry equator of the so-called Red Planet.


The water area is quite large. In fact, it’s more than the size of Netherlands as it covers around 15,800 square miles  or 41,000 square kilometers. While it’s also a known fact that Mars once had huge oceans, the particles of ice or hydrated minerals found in the top soil outside the polar regions are all that remains to it. Hence, the 40 percent has exceeded the previous estimations of the potential for water that may be found away from these frozen poles.

“We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water—far more water than we expected,” shared Alexey Malakhov. He is a scientist at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He also said, “This is very much like Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.”


They made this amazing discovery as they probed into the deep recesses of the Valles Marineris, the solar system’s largest canyon. This is actually 10 times longer and five times deeper than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. They made use of a specialized instrument to pull this off.

The researchers used the Trace Gas Orbiter. This was a joint research project by the European Space Agency and Roscosmos, its Russian counterpart. Onboard, a device for recording neutrons that exited the soil of a planet required about three years of recordings before they were able to come across the discovery.

The Conversation

Neutrons that have been deposited in the soil of the Valles Marineris, says Malakhov, through galactic cosmic rays, and more of them make their way out again through the drier soil than through moist soil. Meaning, when there is a lack of neutrons, this could be taken as a sign that water is actually present. But it’s also more than that because this discovery is good for many reasons. One, unmanned missions directed to Mars tend to hone in on the equatorial region, the location of its canyon and water. Also, which the researchers assume exists as ice, can be found at one meter below the surface. They compared this to water at the polar regions because these can’t be easily accessed unless one brings equipment to drill or dig themselves to about a kilometer deep.

“Such ice not only is an intriguing material for searching frozen proto-life fragments or complex organic molecules from the early epoch of Mars, but also is an indispensable natural resource for future Mars exploration that is easy to exploit,” Malakhov and his co-authors said in their corresponding paper. This has been published in Icarus.

 

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