The phrase "follow the water" is used when planning missions to Mars. In the next ten years, astronauts will need access to water to meet their basic needs. It's important to follow the water in our exploration of Mars and learn more about it. The majority of the planet's water is locked away in the polar ice caps, but rivers, lakes, and an ocean existed billions of years ago.
To learn how Mars became the dry and cold place it is today, it's important to know where the water went. The discovery of a huge deposit of water ice beneath the southern polar region was made in the late 1990s. The South Pole Layered Deposit may be the result of geological layers according to recent findings by a team of researchers.
Daniel Lalich is a research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Space Science. He was joined by Valerio Poggiali, a research associate and associate professor, as well as the director of the Spacecraft Planetary Image Facility and a faculty leader. The paper titled " Explaining Bright Radar Reflections Below The South Pole of Mars Without Liquid Water" was published in September.
The Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding was used to detect the SPLD. There has been an ongoing debate as to whether the SPLD is water ice or something else since the radar reflection was the result of a 1.4 km thick formation of water ice. Lalich and his colleagues used computer simulations to investigate what could have caused the strong radar reflections.
According to their paper, radar reflections of this kind are the result of liquid water on Earth, as indicated by buried lakes like Lake Vostok. Conditions on Mars were thought to be too cold for lakes to form. A one-dimensional modeling procedure was used to investigate this. The layers were composed of four materials and assigned a permittivity.
The interaction between a material and radiation is described in this way. Simulations using three layers of CO2 ice separated by a layer of dusty ice produced reflections as bright as the MARSIS observations. The geological layers could account for the readings without the presence of water. Lalich explained in a news release that.
“I used CO2 layers embedded within the water ice because we know it already exists in large quantities near the surface of the ice cap. In principle, though, I could have used rock layers or even particularly dusty water ice, and I would have gotten similar results. The point of this paper is really that the composition of the basal layers is less important than the layer thicknesses and separations.”
The team found that the layers have a bigger impact on reflection power than the composition. The MARSIS readings can be reproduced without water, despite the fact that there is no liquid water beneath the south pole. In research conducted in 2021, it was shown that a class of minerals common on Mars could produce a reflection similar to what was seen by MARSIS.
It's important that scientists know where water is on Mars because it's important to understand the evolution of the red planet. The presence of liquid water beneath the polar cap could have important implications for its age, internal heating of Mars, and how the planet's climate evolved in the past. Many other underground lakes have been detected in the last few years. Lalich and his colleagues are still considering the possibility of liquid water.
We could use liquid water for future human missions to Mars. There is a possibility that liquid water exists down there. The interference hypothesis is more in line with other observations. I don't think a drill can prove either side of the debate.
Nature Astronomy is a further reading.
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