Lots of Pure Water Ice At Mars North Pole

brink2012 writes "Planum Boreum, Mars' north polar cap contains water ice 'of a very high degree of purity,' according to an international study. Using radar data from the SHARAD (SHAllow RADar) instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), French researchers say the data point to 95 percent purity in the polar ice cap. The north polar cap is a dome of layered, icy materials, similar to the large ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica, consisting of layered deposits, with mostly ice and a small amount of dust. Combined, the north and south polar ice caps are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometers (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, making it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America's Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. kms (5,439 miles). The study was done by researchers at France's National Institute of Sciences of the Universe (Insu), using the Italian built SHARAD radar sounder on the US built MRO. SHARAD looks for liquid or frozen water in the first few hundreds of feet (up to 1 kilometer) of Mars' crust by using subsurface sounding. It can detect liquid water and profile ice. Mars southern polar cap was once thought to be carbon dioxide ice, but ESA's Mars Express confirmed that it is composed of a mixture of water and carbon dioxide. The study on Mars north polar cap appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union."

Comments

So Close

[Punko]

Sufficient Gravity - Check

Sufficient Sunlight - Check

Friable surface (soil) - Check

Sufficient Source of water - check

Sufficient Atmosphere - ummmmm

Sufficient Magnetosphere - uh oh

Cigar - Nope.

Close, but no cigar.

Re:So Close

[Sobrique]

Close enough I reckon. The biggest inhibitor to colonization of Mars is not the atmosphere or the magnetosphere - those are possible to solve technically, and already have been for previous space expeditions.

What's really not easy to deal with is water and oxygen supplies - if you have to haul every single kilo of water up the gravity well, you add a massive burden to the operation.

The fact that we have large quantities of ice to work with, means we have both water, and - by virtue of solar power if necessary, oxygen from electrolysis.

That's really the major ingredients that are needed to consider a place 'habitable' if not exactly 'comfortable'.

Re:What is the volume?

[MRe_nl]

The salty Caspian Sea is the world's largest land-locked body of water. It contains approximately 18,900 cubic miles of water (78,700 cubic kilometers).

Lake Baikal is the world's largest freshwater lake in terms of volume. It contains about 5521 cubic miles of water (23,000 cubic kilometers), or approximately 20% of Earth's fresh surface water. This is a volume of water approximately equivalent to all five of the North American Great Lakes combined.

Re:Look at that bottled water opportunity!

[Futile Rhetoric]

You're right! It sounds almost too good to be true!

Re:Look at that bottled water opportunity!

[slasho81]

Martian Water: Now only $1,000 a liter!

Still cheaper than a liter of printer ink.

So we're less atypical than we think?

[Kupfernigk]

The last few hundred years of human history have seen people gradually being forced to abandon our exceptionalism. From the belief that the Earth is the centre of the universe to identifying it as a small planet going round an only slightly above average star has taken about 500 years. The belief that human beings, despite having the same biological mechanisms as the other mammals, are essentially different in some magical way is in retreat. Palaeontologists are now assigning more and more anthropoid remains to the genus homo - Neanderthals are now considered merely a different race. But a lot of people are still kicking and screaming to believe that the Earth is somehow magically a uniquely habitable planet. This is perhaps why there was such resistance, first to the idea of water on Mars, then to admitting that there is a lot. The story of recent Mars exploration so far is that it is more like the Earth than expected. This is despite its size and distance from the sun - which raises the possible number of habitable planets out there.

The last time I posted on this - pointing out that so far 100% of the actual planets we've explored have been inhabited - someone replied repeatedly emphasising the words "on Earth" - whereas my entire point was that this view is "Earth exceptionalism". Other than a few vague words in a book written over 2000 years ago by one small Middle Eastern tribe, we have no written statement on the subject (while most Indians religions support a plurality of worlds.)

Mars may not be inhabited by life, it may never have been - but we are now seeing a lot more water than previously believed, and evidence of methane generation. The probability must be assessed as non-zero.