Since 2015, NASA has been engaging scientists and engineers to determine deposits of water ice on Mars that could be within reach of astronauts on the surface of the planet.
Such an initiative is done mainly because, as indicated in a Phys.org report, "schlepping all that water" to the Red Planet would not just be costly but dangerous too.
Nevertheless, the said report specified that certainly, water comprises huge scientific value, as well that, if today's microbial life exists on Mars, it would possibly nearby these sources of water, too.
A new study appearing in Nature Astronomy includes a comprehensive map detailing where water ice is most and least likely to be found in the planet's northern hemisphere.
Integrating two decades of data from the Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor that's now inactive, this research is a project work also called "Subsurface Water Ice Mapping" or SWIM.
This is an initiative led by the Tucson, Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute, and managed by the Southern California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA.
To Look for Signs of Microbial Life
According to Richard Davis, who's leading the initiatives of NASA to find Martian resources to prepare for sending humans to Mars.
He emphasized that there is a need "to make new maps of subsurface ice to improve our knowledge" of the area where ice is for both scientific exploration, "and having local resources astronauts" can depend on.
In the near future, the plans of NASA to conduct a workshop for multidisciplinary experts to evaluate probable human-landing locations on Mars based on this study, as well as other science and engineering criteria.
Such a mapping project could inform surveys too, by astronauts NASA is hoping to send to Mars. Recently, this independent agency of the federal government of the United States announced that, together with three international space agencies, it is signing a statement of an intent "to explore possible 'International Mars Ice Mapper' mission concept."
The said statement is bringing the agencies together to establish a collaborative concept group that will evaluate mission potential, and alliance opportunities between NASA, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana or the Italian space agency, the Canadian Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Physical Properties Detected
Experts in the Space industry said, knowing if a surface is hiding ice is not easy. According to Planetary Institute's Gareth Morgan, co-lead of the SWIM project and lead author of the paper, none among the instrument datasets used in the study were developed to directly gauge the ice.
Instead, he added, each orbiter instrument is able to detect different physical properties, high hydrogen concentrations, high speed of radar waves, and the rate at which temperature is changing in a surface, that can suggest the existence of ice.
Commending on their work, Morgan also said, despite having two decades of data, not to mention a fantastic range of instruments, it is "hard to combine these datasets" as they are all quite different.
This is the reason, he continued, they are assessing an ice signal's consistency, exhibiting areas where multiple datasets specify the presence of ice.
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