NASA | JPL-Caltech | Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter | 2016 Nov 22
[img3="This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar aboard NASA's MRO. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona"]http://mars.nasa.gov/imgs/2016/11/scall ... 6-full.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]Frozen beneath 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, researchers using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have determined.
Scientists examined part of Mars' Utopia Planitia region, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter's ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes with the onboard radar instrument reveal a deposit more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico. The deposit ranges in thickness from about 260 feet (80 meters) to about 560 feet (170 meters), with a composition that's 50 to 85 percent water ice, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles.
At the latitude of this deposit -- about halfway from the equator to the pole -- water ice cannot persist on the surface of Mars today. It sublimes into water vapor in the planet's thin, dry atmosphere. The Utopia deposit is shielded from the atmosphere by a soil covering estimated to be about 3 to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) thick. ...
SHARAD Detection and Characterization of Subsurface Water Ice Deposits in Utopia Planitia, Mars - C. M. Stuurman et al
- Geophysical Research Letters 43(18):9484 (28 Sep 2016) DOI: 10.1002/2016GL070138
