MOSCOW — The largest canyon in the solar system, the Valles Marineris on Mars, could contain reserves of hidden water, according to a new study in the Icarus journal, which found as much as 40 percent of the near-surface materia in a central region of the canyon appears to be water, either bound up in minerals or, more likely, taking the form of subsurface water ice up to a meter below the surface.
Water is known to exist at Mars’s poles, in the form of ice caps, and last year liquid water lakes were discovered beneath its south pole via a Nature Astronomy journal study which used radar data from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding.
However, using a different technique scientists were surprised to find so much water beneath the surface of Valles Marineris, where pressure and temperature conditions ought to prohibit it, according to Science Alert.
The new study looked at neutrons produced when galactic cosmic rays strike Mars, and used the fact that drier soils emit more neutrons than wetter ones to detect the presence of water.
Discoveries like this are notable generally because if water stores exist in a permafrost-like form they may have preserved frozen fragments of microbial life, or organic molecules that once existed on Mars.
Furthermore, because any crewed mission to Mars is likely to touch down at the equator, this easily accessible water could provide a valuable resource.
Physicist Colin Wilson of the European Space Agency, which backed the research, also added in a statement cited by CNN that “Knowing more about how and where water exists on present-day Mars is essential to understand what happened to Mars's once-abundant water, and helps our search for habitable environments, possible signs of past life, and organic materials from Mars's earliest days.”
A previous study in 2017 using the same detection techniques had hinted at the existence of water ice in different parts of the equator by looking at old data.
