Water ice buried at Mars' equator is over 2 miles thick [View all]

By Keith Cooper published about 10 hours ago

The Mars Express orbiter has detected enough water ice buried beneath the Red Planet's equator to cover the entire planet in a shallow ocean if melted.



a black-and-white map of mars with blue sections denoting where water ice has been detected
This map shows the estimated amount of ice within the mounds that form the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF) consists of a series of wind-sculpted deposits measuring hundreds of kilometers across and several kilometers high, indicating that the ice-rich deposits are up to 3000m thick. (Image credit: Planetary Science Institute/Smithsonian Institution)


A European Space Agency (ESA) probe has found enough water to cover Mars in an ocean between 4.9 and 8.9 feet (1.5 and 2.7 meters) deep, buried in the form of dusty ice beneath the planet's equator.

The finding was made by ESA's Mars Express mission, a veteran spacecraft that has been engaged in science operations around Mars for 20 years now. While it's not the first time that evidence for ice has been found near the Red Planet's equator, this new discovery is by far the largest amount of water ice detected there so far and appears to match previous discoveries of frozen water on Mars.

"Excitingly, the radar signals match what we expect to see from layered ice and are similar to the signals we see from Mars' polar caps, which we know to be very ice rich," said lead researcher Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States in an ESA statement.

The deposits are thick, extended 3.7km (2.3) miles underground, and topped by a crust of hardened ash and dry dust hundreds of meters thick. The ice is not a pure block but is heavily contaminated by dust. While its presence near the equator is a location more easily accessible to future crewed missions, being buried so deep means that accessing the water-ice would be difficult

More:
https://www.space.com/mars-water-ice-equator-frozen-ocean