A Mars orbit launched in 2016 has spotted water in Mars’ canyon system called the Valleys Mariner is. The canyon system is the largest in the Solar System and is about ten times longer and five times deeper than Earth’s Grand Canyon. The Cosmos Mars Trace Gas Orbiter is a joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Russian Cosmos agency. The water was spotted using the Trace Gas Orbiter Fine Resolution Epidermal Neutron Detector (FRED) instrument, which helps map hydrogen on the surface of the red planet.
“With GO we can look down to one meter below this dusty layer and see what’s really going on below Mars’ surface – and, crucially, locate water-rich ‘oases’ that couldn’t be detected with previous instruments,” said Big RR of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia in a press statement. He is also the lead author of the study recently published in Icarus detailing this new find.
The detector showed that there was an unusual amount of hydrogen in the Candor Chaos, situated in the central region of the Valley Mariners. The team writes that a little over 40 percent of the near-surface material region appears to be water. It adds that the water-rich area is about the size of the Netherlands.
Co-author Alexey Markov, also of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, explained further, “We found a central part of Valley Mariners to be packed full of water – far more water than we expected. This is very much like Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.”
A paper published in October in Science,
had confirmed that Mars’ Hetero crater was once a lake. Pictures sent by NASA’s Perseverance rover helped make the discovery. Last year, another research paper had shown the presence of three underground water lakes in the South Pole of the Red planet.
“Knowing more about how and where water exists on present-day Mars is essential to understand what happened to Mars’ once-abundant water, and helps our search for habitable environments, possible signs of past life, and organic materials from Mars’ earliest days,” said Colin Wilson, Mars Trace Gas Orbiter project scientist.
Mars was once a wet world, with abundant bodies of water on its surface. But this changed dramatically billions of years ago, leaving behind the desolate landscape known today. So what happened to the water? Scientists have a new hypothesis.
Researchers said this week that somewhere between about 30% and 99% of it may now be trapped within minerals in the Martian crust, running counter to the long-held notion that it simply was lost into space by escaping through the upper atmosphere.
“We find the majority of Mars’ water was lost to the crust. The water was lost by 3 billion years ago, meaning Mars has been the dry planet it is today for the past 3 billion years,” said California Institute of Technology Ph.D. candidate Eva Schaller, lead author of the NASA-funded study published on Tuesday in the journal Science.
Early in its history, Mars may have possessed liquid water on its surface approximately equivalent in volume to half of the Atlantic Ocean, enough to have covered the entire planet with water perhaps up to nearly a mile (1.5 km) deep.
Water is made up of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. The amount of a hydrogen isotope, or variant, called deuterium present on Mars provided some clues about the water loss. Unlike most hydrogen atoms that have just a single proton within the atomic nucleus, deuterium – or “heavy” hydrogen – boasts a proton and a neutron. Ordinary hydrogen can escape through the atmosphere into space more readily than deuterium. Water loss through the atmosphere, according to scientists, would leave behind a very large ratio of deuterium compared to ordinary hydrogen. The researchers used a model that simulated the hydrogen isotope composition and water volume of Mars.“There are three key processes within this model: water input from volcanism, water loss to space, and water loss to the crust.
Through this model and matching it to our hydrogen isotope data set, we can calculate how much water was lost to space and to the crust,” Schaller said. The researchers suggested that a lot of the water did not actually leave the planet, but rather ended up trapped in various minerals that contain water as part of their mineral structure – clays and sulfates in particular. This trapped water, while apparently plentiful when taken as a whole, may not provide a practical resource for future astronaut missions to Mars.
“The amount of water within a rock or mineral is very small. You would have to heat a lot of rock to release water in an appreciable amount,” Schaller said.
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