2023-10-31 16:45:24
The water ice from the Martian subsoil will be a vital resource for the first people to set foot on Mars, as it will serve as a source of drinking water and surely also as an ingredient for the rocket fuel they will use on the return trip to Earth.
The water ice from the Martian subsoil will also be an important material for scientific study: astronauts or robots will one day drill holes in blocks of ice to extract ice cores from their interior, as other scientists on Earth do with its ice. From ancient Martian ice, it will be possible to reconstruct in detail the climatic history of Mars and search for possible habitats (past or present) for microbial life.
The need to look for underground ice is because liquid water is not stable on the Martian surface: The atmosphere is so thin that water evaporates immediately.
There is a lot of ice at the Martian poles. It is mainly water, although carbon dioxide ice (“dry ice”) can also be found. The problem is that those regions are too cold for astronauts (or robots) to survive long.
That’s where the NASA-funded SWIM (Subsurface Water Ice Mapping) initiative comes into play.
The SWIM team has just published its fourth set of maps, the most detailed since the program began in 2017.
Led from the Tucson Planetary Science Institute in Arizona and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), SWIM gathers data from several NASA space probes, including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the 2001 Mars Odyssey and the now inactive MGO (Mars Global Surveyor).
Using a combination of data sets, SWIM scientists have identified the most likely places to find Martian ice that could be accessed from the surface without much difficulty in future missions.
The blue areas on this map of a sector of Mars are areas where NASA missions have detected water ice at shallow depths in the subsurface. (Image: NASA JPL/Caltech/Planetary Science Institute)
The instruments on these spacecraft have detected what appear to be masses of frozen water at shallow depths in the subsurface, at various points in the mid-latitudes of Mars. The ideal ice deposits are those closest to the Martian equator, since the temperatures there are not as cold.
Previous versions of the set of maps relied on lower resolution images and less reliable data, so the locations of the water ice masses were only probable. On the other hand, the new version allows for much more reliable and precise information to be provided. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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