IT House December 16 news, December 15, the European Space Agency issued a notice that the agency and the Russian State Space Corporation jointly implemented the Mars exploration project through its trace gas orbiter found that there is a large amount of water one meter underground in the central area of the Mars Mariner Canyon, which may exist in the form of ice or water-bearing minerals. The area of this watery zone is said to be equivalent to the size of the entire Netherlands.
This is based on new research based on data collected by the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which is part of the ExoMars mission operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and its Russian counterpart. ExoMars includes TGO, launched in 2016, and the Rosalind Franklin probe, which will be launched to Mars next year. Among the instruments on TGO is an instrument called the Fine Resolution External Heat Neutron Detector (FREND), which detects hydrogen, one of the two elements that make up water. A new analysis of FREND's data shows high levels of hydrogen in a place called Candor Chaos, which is located near the center of a huge system of canyons known as Valles Marineris.
Alexey Malakhov, senior scientist at the Institute of Space Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences and co-author of the new paper, said in an ESA statement: "We found that the central part of Mariner Canyon was filled with water, much more than we expected. This is very much like a permafrost region on Earth, where water ice persists under dry soil due to persistent low temperatures. ”
Igor Mitrofanov, another scientist at the Institute of Space Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, lead author of the new study and lead researcher of the FREND instrument, said in the statement: "With TGO, we can see a meter below the Martian dust layer and see what is really happening below the surface of Mars – and, crucially, find a water-rich 'oasis' that previous instruments could not detect." ”
If all the hydrogen they detected was in the form of water ice, the researchers said, the precious compound could account for as much as 40 percent of the region's near-surface material. However, FREND may also be detecting water built into local minerals, though scientists believe this is less likely than ice.
H kan Svedhem, a former ESA ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter project scientist and co-author of the new study, said in a statement: "This discovery is an amazing first step, but we need more observations to determine the form of water we are dealing with. Whatever the outcome, the discovery shows that TGO's instruments are unparalleled in their ability to 'see' below the surface of Mars — and reveals that there is a huge, not-too-deep reservoir in this area of Mars that is easily minable. ”
IT House understands that, according to ESA's statement, the new study is based on data collected by FREND between May 2018 and February 2021.
Colin Wilson, a scientist on ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Program, said in a statement: "Knowing more about how and where water exists on Mars today is critical to understanding what happened to the once abundant water on Mars, helping us look for habitable environments, possible signs of past life, and the earliest organic material on Mars." ”