Scientists Just Found a 'Significant' Volume of Water Inside Mars' Grand Canyon Mars' Valles Marineris canyon system is hiding water The newly discovered volume of water is hiding under the surface of Mars, and was detected by the Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission in its first stage under the guidance of the ESA-Roscosmos project dubbed ExoMars. Signs of water were picked up by the orbiter's Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument, which is designed to survey the Red Planet's landscape and map the presence and concentration of hydrogen hiding in Mars' soil. It works like this: while high-energy cosmic rays plunge into the surface, the soil emits neutrons. And wet soil emits fewer neutrons than dry soil, which enables scientists to analyze and assess the water content of soil, hidden beneath its ancient surface. "FREND revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system: 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," said Igor Mitrofanov, the Russian Academy of Science's lead investigator of the Space Research Institute, in the ESA press release. Scientists have already discovered water on Mars, but most earlier discoveries detected the substance crucial to life as we know it near the poles of the Red Planet, subsisting as ice. Only very small pockets of water had shown up at lower latitudes, which was a big downer because future astronauts on Mars will need a lot of water, and there are better prospects for settling the planet at lower latitudes. But now, with what seems like a comparative abundance of water in Valles Marineris, we've taken a major step toward establishing a reliable source of water on the closest alien world.
Well why don't all the brilliant geniuses at NASA land a rover at the ice caps, WHERE THEY ARE SURE THERE IS WATER ICE? Hello?!?! That will be a 20 million dollar consulting fee for that brilliant idea. Kthxbye.
Maybe you should let them know how easy it is? https://www.nasa.gov/content/submit-a-question-for-nasa
NASA's Perseverance rover finds organic chemicals on Mars NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has found life's building blocks on the Red Planet. Perseverance has identified carbon-containing organic chemicals in some of the rocks it has examined on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater, mission team members announced on Wednesday (Dec. 15). Organics can be produced by both biological and non-biological means, and more work is needed to figure out what processes generated the Jezero compounds.