According to a report, using data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists have discovered a large deposit of ice just beneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on Mars. Frozen underneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on Mars lies about as much water as what's in Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes. The ice layer, which spans a greater area than the state of New Mexico, lies in Mars' mid-northern latitudes and is covered by just 3 feet to 33 feet of soil.
Water On Mars
Almost all water on Mars nowadays exists as ice. However, at some point, it also exists in small quantities as vapor in the atmosphere and occasionally, as low-volume liquid brines in shallow Martian soil. The only place where water ice is visible at the surface is at the north polar ice cap. Abundant water ice is also present beneath the permanent carbon dioxide ice cap at the Martian south pole and in the shallow subsurface at more temperate latitudes.
A Giant Ice Deposit Found In Mars
"This deposit probably formed as snowfall accumulating into an ice sheet mixed with dust during a period in Mars history when the planet's axis was more tilted than it is today," said Cassie Stuurman of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the lead author of a report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Casie Stuurman is the lead researcher of the whole study who observed the Mars' Utopia Planitia region
According to Foxnews, Mars' Utopia Planitia region made by the ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They focused on this area because Utopia Planitia features "scalloped depressions" similar to landscapes in the Canadian Arctic that lie atop buried ice. Data gathered by SHARAD during 600 MRO passes over Utopia Planitia revealed the deposit between 39 and 49 degrees north latitude.
"This deposit is probably more accessible than most water ice on Mars, because it is at a relatively low latitude and it lies in a flat, smooth area where landing a spacecraft would be easier than at some of the other areas with buried ice," co-author Jack Holt, of the University of Texas, Austin, said in a statement.
