Africa-Press – Rwanda. Researchers who detected the new water deposit through the Trace Gas Orbiter’s equipment, believe that this liquid “more likely exists in the form of ice”.
The presence of “significant amounts” of water has been discovered beneath the soil of Mars in a system of canyons known as Valles Marineris, or the Mariner Valley, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced.
According to a statement posted on the space agency’s official website, the discovery was made via the ESA-Roscosmos’ Trace Gas Orbiter’s (TGO) Fine-Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument that can detect hydrogen “in the uppermost metre of the planet’s soil.”
As Mitrofanov explained, FREND “revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system”. The scientist further suggested that, “assuming the hydrogen we see is bound into water molecules, as much as 40% of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water”.
While the water detected by TGO may potentially be “chemically bound to other minerals in the soil”, other observations suggest that “minerals seen in this part of Mars typically contain only a few percent water, much less than is evidenced by these new observations”.
Another study co-author, Hakan Svedhem from ESA’s ESTEC in the Netherlands, described the new discovery as “an amazing first step”, but pointed at the necessity for “more observations to know for sure what form of water we’re dealing with”.
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