Mars strategy change: they find ice in a place they thought there would not be

A new analysis of data taken long ago by the Mars Odyssey probe suggests that there might be ice hiding near the Martian equator, even though scientists thought there could be no water.

Mars Odyssey made its first major discovery: it found hydrogen underground in areas near the poles, indicating that there might be water ice in those latitudes. In 2008, Mars Phoenix Lander confirmed that, indeed, there was water ice.

At the latitudes closest to the equator, certain quantities of hydrogen were also detected. However, they were associated with the presence of hydrated minerals that, on the other hand, other probes have observed. The researchers believed that water ice was unsustainable in those latitudes.

However, a new study includes the reinterpreted analyzes of the neutron spectrometer of the Mars Odyssey probe. And although this instrument is not designed to detect water directly, the detection of neutrons can detect traces of hydrogen that would indicate the presence of both water and other substances carrying hydrogen. These data have been analyzed with new techniques developed for later missions and now used in medicine.

The application of this technique improved the spatial resolution of the data. "It was as if we had reduced the orbital altitude of the probe in half. It gave us a much better view of what is happening on the surface," explains Jack Wilson, a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Applied Physics at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. United States and lead author of the article. With this new analysis, researchers saw high levels of hydrogen suggesting the presence of water.

This new study focused on equatorial zones, concreting around the Medusae Fossae formation, an area in which there are materials that are easy to erode. Earlier observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter suggested that there could be ice deposits just below the surface. Scientists, however, were skeptical. However, this new study makes the odds of finding water ice dramatically increasing.


If there is really water there, it would help plan a future human mission to the Red Planet because it could mean that astronauts would not need to carry water for drinking, cooling equipment or watering. Astronauts may be able to live off the Martian soil, thus reducing the number of resources that would need to be transported from Earth.