An Underground Ice Deposit On Mars Is Bigger Than New Mexico (popularmechanics.com)

schwit1 quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: A single underground deposit of ice on Mars contains about as much water as there is in Michigan's Lake Superior, according to new research from NASA. The deposit rests in the mid-northern latitudes of the Red Planet, specifically in the Utopia Planitia region. Discovered by the Shallow Subsurface Radar (SHARD) instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the deposit is "more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico," according to a NASA press release. It ranges in thickness from about 260 feet to about 560 feet, and has a composition that's 50 to 85 percent water ice, with what appears to be dust or larger rocky particles mixed in as well. None of the ice is exposed to the surface. At various points the dirt covering it is in between 3 and 33 feet thick.

Comments

Dispatch from the Red Planet

[phantomfive]

The Council of the Elders met in counsel to discuss the latest developments. All Martians waited to hear the news. Some came to wait outside the headquarters, others listened on the Ber'gor network. The doors opened, and a security detail walked out (with their gelsacs swollen), followed by K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of the Elders, who paused to look over the gathered crowd. Soon he gathered his thoughts and began to speak:

Reports that our treasure has been discovered by the Earthlings have been far overstated. Our receivers have determined that initial reports were wrong, they merely found our waste pile in the northern wasteland. Our refuse has been covered there, mixed with rock and dirt, buried to keep it away from us. Be assured that the true heart of Martian treasure remains concealed well in the southern reaches.

And with that, he turned and exited.

Re: There is only one way this ends..

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our triple-tittied stripper overlords.

Michigan's Lake Superior

[quenda]

> as much water as there is in Michigan's Lake Superior,

So what is that? Aboutr 40% the volume of Lake Superior?
More than Minnesota's part, but less than Canada's? Or has Trump annexed the whole lake already?

This makes several Mars mission plans feasible

[ShooterNeo]

Prior to this, the assumption was that the moisture percentage in the soil was only a few percent. This meant that to get water for a large greenhouse or to electrolyze to hydrogen to fuel a methane ascent rocket, you'd need a bulldozer and a large oven and rock crusher. Heavy stuff and hardly worth sending to Mars unless you were doing missions on a large scale (easier to just send the water you need and liquid hydrogen as payload on the lander).

If there really is a massive frozen lake of mostly water just a few feet down, you could land on a spot where the soil is thin and drill down. Maybe evaporate the water by sending hot CO2 down the hole or something, and collecting the moisture in the steam that rises back up. (you get the CO2 by compressing martian atmosphere and then heating it)

This seems a lot more feasible, though doing it using a purely robotic lander would still be very hard.

Re:This makes several Mars mission plans feasible

[Rei]

Explosives would work great, but only if you ignore the existence of sublimation when the now fractured ice gets exposed to the Martian atmosphere.

Standard Units

[Anonymous Coward]

Lake Michigan is in New Mexico?
Why don't they use standard units like football fields, double-decker buses or, the correct one in this case, olympic sized swimming pools.

Re:ATTN: Flat Earth Truthers

[Joce640k]

The main belief of stupid flat earth truthers is that NASA is lying about everything

Also Trump supporters

Re:Future human habbitation

[Rei]

Too bad there isn't some simple process to purify water, I mean really simple, like boiling-water and condensing-steam simple...

Pop quiz: what do you get when you boil perchlorates? Answer, in case you didn't know: hydrochloric acid vapours. And that's just the start of problems you're going to have.

And it's not just perchlorates in there. There's arsenic, hexavalent chromium, you name it. At one NASA conference, there was a glacier expert who suggested just this - going to an ice deposit on Mars, digging some up, melting it, letting the sediment settle out, and drinking it. A water recycling expert who had worked on the ISS water recycling system almost threw a fit. She said, get us a sample of that water and 15 years later we can give you a space rated water cleaning system for Mars.

Oh, and it's not actually "ice", it's permafrost - 20-50% rock. Digging through permafrost is difficult even on Earth, with equipment optimized for Earth conditions for over a century. Slow and very high maintenance; permafrost acts like concrete, with water playing the role of cement as a binder. And in case you didn't know, we don't exactly have a bunch of nuclear powered Martian backhoes sitting around. The closest we've come to "digging" on another world is a tiny slow robotic scoop for loose materials. The closest we've come to "drilling" is tiny little abrasion bores. The closest we've come to melting is.... nothing, we haven't.

NASA's looked at a wide range of different methods for getting water on Mars, many of them involving extracting from ice, including digging, drilling, melting, etc. Their conclusion is that this is important and we need to be working on it, but the TRL is almost nothing. There's a lot of problems that you just wouldn't think of. For example, as soon as you dig off the overburden, the ice underneath starts sublimating. If you leave it overnight, you'll come back to fresh overburden on the top.