Mar's South Pole full of frozen water

New York: A new measurement of Mars' south polar region indicates that it contains enough frozen water to cover the whole planet in a liquid layer approximately 36 feet deep, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on Friday.

A joint NASA-Italian Space Agency instrument, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), installed on the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft provided these data.

Understanding the history and fate of water on Mars is a key to studying whether Mars has ever supported life, since all known life depends on liquid water.

MARSIS is also mapping the thickness of similar layered deposits at the north pole of Mars.

This new estimate comes from mapping the thickness of the ice. The Mars Express orbiter's radar instrument has made more than 300 virtual slices through layered deposits covering the pole to map the ice.

The radar sees through icy layers to the lower boundary, which is as deep as 2.3 miles below the surface.

"The south polar layered deposits of Mars cover an area bigger than Texas. The amount of water they contain has been estimated before but never with the level of confidence this radar makes possible," said Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Pasadena, California.

Giovanni Picardi, the principal investigator for the instrument from the side of Italy said: "MARSIS is showing itself to be a very powerful tool to probe underneath the Martian surface, and it's showing how our team's goals, such as probing the polar layered deposits, are being successfully achieved.

"Not only is MARSIS providing us with the first-ever views of Mars subsurface at those depths, but the details we are seeing are truly amazing. These should enable us to understand even better the surface and subsurface composition,” Picardi added.

The polar-layered deposits extend beyond and beneath a polar cap of bright white frozen carbon dioxide and water at Mars' south pole.

Dust darkens many of the layers but the strength of the echo that the radar receives from the rocky surface underneath the layered deposits suggests the composition of the layered deposits is at least 90 per cent frozen water.

However, scientists working on the mission believe that the conditions are so cold that the presence of melted water is deemed highly unlikely.

Plaut further said that the crust and upper mantle of Mars are stiffer than the Earth's, probably because "the interior of Mars is so much colder."