14 DAY TRIAL // A team of geologists and planetary scientists announces the discovery of water-ice deposits at latitudes as low as 25 degrees. The discoveries, made on the Red Planet, provide new hope that a potential manned mission to the Red Planet is possible.
The finding is extremely important, because future space explorers would use the materials for a variety of applications, such as for example creating hydrogen rocket fuel, pure water and oxygen.
All of these substances are necessary if the mission is to succeed. It would however be impossible to carry them all the way there form Earth. And a prospective crew would not survive if they landed on the polar regions of Mars.
As such, it was critical that water-ice deposits be found at low latitudes, as close to the Equator as possible. A team led by expert Mathieu Vincendon, from the Brown University in Rhode Island, recently managed to do just that.
Using data collected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express and the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the group was able to calculate the existence of water-ice beneath the polar-facing slopes of hills and other landscape features at 25 degrees latitude.
The existence of the critical chemical was inferred from the thermal characteristics of the locations the two spacecraft analyzed. Researchers found carbon dioxide on the surface of polar-facing slopes, and they say that only a cold, underground layer of material could explain the chemical.
In turn, the underground layer cannot be explained through anything else than water-ice, the science team explains, quoted by Technology Review. The Mars Express and MRO datasets are very precise.
The ESA probe has been circling the Red Planet since 2004, while the MRO arrived there in 2006. Since then, all they have been doing is collect information about the characteristics of the planet's soil.
But there's yet another positive aspect to this discovery, experts say. It could be that Holden Crater, a landscape feature located at 26 degrees latitude, may contain water-ice as well.
This spot is one of the four candidates in the race to become the landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity, which is scheduled to launch later this year.
As such, it could be that we will get our robotic hands on some of the stuff within less than two years. Given that Curiosity is especially equipped to conduct biological investigations, experts are hopeful that the robot will be able to dig deep enough to reach the water-ice.