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Vast Subsurface Martian Ice Discovered

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the i've-got-you-under-my-skin dept.

The Fun Guy writes to tell us New Scientist is reporting that deep-scan radar results from ESA's Mars Express spacecraft have revealed vast amounts of subsurface ice. From the article: "Intriguingly, the signal reflected from the bottom of the crater is so strong and appears so flat that it may be liquid water. 'If you put water there, that's what the signal might look like,' Johnson told New Scientist. But he cautions the data is based on only one pass over the region and could be caused by another material."

3 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. Turn your volume up! by Volanin · · Score: 5, Informative

    This sounds very interesting!
    Click here for an audio interview about the finding.

    --
    If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
    If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
  2. On the right track by everphilski · · Score: 5, Informative

    Its too thin. That's the problem, trying to make the atmosphere thicker. You basically have to import gasses one way or another. Gasses are bulky though, there are better ways to do it, like plants, biomass, etc. that can break down matter from a solid state into gas. Martian rock is actually rather rusty and carbonaceous (sp?) if you had a good cheap source of heat you could heat it up and get some carbon dioxide and oxygen off of it... its not an easy problem to tackle. Other methods that have been suggested have been bombarding the surface with asteroids from the asteroid belt (many of them have a lot of solid gasses on them) or detonating nuclear bombs (bad idea IMO).

    -everphilski-

  3. Re:Yup by BarryNorton · · Score: 5, Informative

    NASA did not "find water" years ago... or ever! They found the gamma-ray spectrometry signature for hydrogen and proposed this was likely locked up in ice. Now a different means has been used to measure the subsurface (much more effectively in terms of depth, if less conclusively in terms of composition) and also found results not inconsistent with ice. We will probably not 'find ice' until someone goes there and drills. Until then, different means of measurement are a good idea (even though the media, and worse the bottom-feeding pseudo-journalism of sites like Slashdot, will misinterpret the conclusions that can be drawn).