NASA has released a “treasure map” showing the likely locations of water ice on Mars that could be used in manned missions to the planet in the future.
The map shows where on the surface of Mars scientists think water ice is located, in some places just centimeters deep. Mars’ atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to last long before evaporating into a gaseous form, making it necessary to locate frozen water that can be found using two heat-sensitive instruments: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Mars Climate Sounder and the Thermal Emission Imaging System camera on the Mars Odyssey Orbiter.
“You wouldn’t need a backhoe to dig up this ice. You could use a shovel,” said Sylvain Piqueux, the lead author of the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, and a member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the MRO and Mars Odyssey for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“We’re continuing to collect data on buried ice on Mars, zeroing in on the best places for astronauts to land,” he added.
“The more we look for near-surface ice, the more we find,” MRO Deputy Project Scientist Leslie Tamppari of JPL added. “Observing Mars with multiple spacecraft over the course of years continues to provide us with new ways of discovering this ice.”
