We were aware that scientists found traces of water on Mars. However, today we hear of something different and astounding! Planetary scientists have located scarps, on the Red Planet. These scarps are nothing but thick sheets of ice that hide below the surface of Mars. This ice, the researchers say, could be a tempting target for future exploration as well as a valuable resource for Earthlings camped out on Mars.
"We've found a new window into the ice for study, which we hope will be of interest to those interested in all aspects of ice on Mars and its history," said Colin Dundas, a member of the U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Science Center in Arizona and an author of a report published on Thursday, last week in a journal. The news, however, isn't considered too surprising though. In 2001, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft arrived at the planet and began snooping for chemical signatures of ice. And the craft's gamma-ray spectrometer found telltale hydrogen which indicated Mars had enormous amounts of ice. Also, as much as a third of the Martian surface contains shallow ice. But remotely sensing elements such as hydrogen could not reveal the depth and makeup of the ice.
The newer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mapped the surface in greater detail. Dundas and his colleagues used its pictures to locate exposed ice in small craters, glaciers and ice sheets. "The high-resolution data has greatly improved our understanding of various ice-related landforms," he said. The cliffs seen are "rare peeks into the subsurface of Mars, giving us access to an undisturbed slice through Mars's ice in the mid-latitudes — a fantastic find," said Susan Conway, a planetary scientist at the University of Nantes in France who was not involved with this research.
The scarps exist along the planet's middle latitudes, ruling out glaciers that migrated from the poles. The study authors propose that these ice sheets formed when thick snows blanketed Mars. Matte Balme, a planetary scientist agreed that snowfall probably created the ice over a period of a few thousand years. Balme said, "If we were to send humans to live on Mars for a substantial period of time, it would be a fantastic source of water."
Does this further prove that Mars could actually be a habitable planet in the near future?
