Mars is thought to have frozen water deep beneath its equator, and if it were to melt, it would cover the entire planet in an ocean more than five feet deep. according to it, european space agencyHis Mars Express spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, discovered what appears to be the largest reserve of water ice ever detected near Mars’ equator. “We do not expect polar ice caps to appear at the equator,” said ESA project scientist Colin Wilson. euro news. “Interestingly, the radar signal is consistent with what we would expect to see from layered ice, and is similar to the signal seen from the polar caps of Mars, which we know are very ice-rich.” says Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution.Research published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The good news is that there appears to be a large amount of ice, about 3.7 miles thick, in the lower latitudes where future astronauts are expected to land. The bad news is that the deposit is “covered by a crust of hardened ash and dry dust” for hundreds of meters. space dot com. It is also “heavily contaminated by dust.” When Mars Express’s subsurface radar MARSIS first detected deposits beneath the Medusae Fossai Formation (MFF) in 2007, experts initially suspected that the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF), the geological formation that separates the northern highlands from the southern lowlands, When they discovered the deposits beneath the Fossai Formation (MFF), they thought this frozen water could be dust. Exciting lies await.
“Given its depth, if the MFF were just a giant dust pile, we would expect it to compress under its own weight, producing something much denser than what we’re actually seeing. ” says study co-author Andrea. Cicchetti of Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics says: The deposits appear to be less dense and somewhat transparent, which is consistent with other frozen water discoveries on Mars. In fact, according to the BBC, Cicchetti said that no model “reproduced the properties of MFF” without the use of ice. night sky. According to Space.com, the deposits may have formed billions of years ago when Mars’ axial tilt (currently 25 degrees) changed from 10 degrees to 60 degrees. As the poles approached the Sun, large amounts of water ice may have formed along the equator before being buried by volcanic ash. (Read more stories about Mars.)