A new map of subsurface water on Mars just dropped, and it reveals regions on the Red Planet where ice may be buried beneath the surface for future astronauts to use.
This week, the NASA-funded Subsurface Water Ice Mapping project (SWIM) released its fourth set of maps, which the space agency is calling the “most detailed” since the project first began in 2017.
Using data from several NASA missions, including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Mars Odyssey, and the Mars Global Surveyor, SWIM identifies the possible locations of subsurface ice on Mars. For the latest SWIM map, scientists relied on two higher resolution cameras on board MRO, which has been orbiting Mars since 2006 in search of water. As a result, the new map has a much more detailed view of subsurface water than previous iterations which relied on lower-resolution imagers, radar, thermal mappers and spectrometers.
Data from MRO’s Context Camera data was used to further refine the northern hemisphere maps while data from HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) was incorporated for the first time to provide the most detailed perspective of the ice’s boundary line as close to the equator as possible, according to NASA. HiRISE even captured a 492-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) impact crater with a “motherlode of ice that had been hiding beneath the surface,” the space agency wrote.
The spacecraft detected what appears to be subsurface frozen water along Mars’ mid-latitudes. This region on Mars is ideal for the landing of future missions as it is characterized by a thicker atmosphere that makes it easier for spacecraft to slow down during their descent to the Martian surface. The real sweet spot for astronauts to land on Mars would be at the southernmost edge of the northern mid-latitudes region, where it’s close enough to the buried ice but also not too far from the equator so that astronauts can enjoy slightly warmer weather.
“If you send humans to Mars, you want to get them as close to the equator as you can,” Sydney Do, SWIM project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “The less energy you have to expend on keeping astronauts and their supporting equipment warm, the more you have for other things they’ll need.”
The Martian poles have plenty of ice, but it’s way too cold over there for astronauts to survive for a long time.
The reason why NASA is more interested in ice found beneath the surface is that any liquid water found on Mars would be unstable. Mars’ atmosphere is so thin that water would immediately evaporate. Subsurface ice, on the other hand, is kept in a safe spot where astronauts can drill ice cores to extract it.
The buried ice will be a valuable resource for future astronauts on Mars who can use it for drinking water or to make rocket fuel. That, in turn, will allow them to carry a lot less to the surface of the Red Planet.
Scientists are also interested to know where the subsurface ice is located on Mars to help them figure out the planet’s climate throughout its history. “The amount of water ice found in locations across the Martian mid-latitudes isn’t uniform; some regions seem to have more than others, and no one really knows why,” Nathaniel Putzig, SWIM’s other co-lead at the Planetary Science Institute, said in a statement. “The newest SWIM map could lead to new hypotheses for why these variations happen.”
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