As of: January 19, 2024, 10:13 p.m
By: Tanja Banner
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In the Medusae Fossae region at the equator of Mars, an ESA space probe finds large amounts of water ice at depth.
How did you get there?
Frankfurt – The Medusae Fossae (MFF) region is located at the equator of the planet Mars and is a mystery for research.
How the approximately 5,000 kilometer long formation came into being remains unclear to this day.
Scientists suspect a volcanic background, as Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, is also located in the region.
The MFF consists of several wind-sculpted structures that are hundreds of kilometers wide and several kilometers high.
They represent one of the largest deposits on the red planet.
As early as 2007, a research team examined the Medusae Fossae Formation with the help of the ESA “Mars Express” space probe and discovered that there were huge deposits underneath with a depth of up to 2.5 kilometers.
What these depots consisted of was unclear – until today.
Mars Express discovers water at the equator of the red planet
A research team has now analyzed more recent data from “Mars Express” and gained new insights into the Medusae Fossae Formation: “We found that the deposits are even thicker than we thought: up to 3.7 kilometers,” says Thomas Watters (Smithsonian Institution), who led both the original study and the new study.
"Interestingly, the radar signals match those we would expect from layered ice and are similar to the signals we see from the polar ice caps of Mars, which we know to be very ice-rich," explains the researcher in an Esa report. Notice.
The Medusae Fossae Formation at the equator of Mars.
© ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
If you melted the ice trapped in the Medusae Fossae Formation, you could cover the entire planet Mars with an ocean 1.5 to 2.7 meters deep.
Or, to compare it with the water supply on Earth: The water would be enough to fill the entire Red Sea.
Layers of dust and ice discovered at Mars' equator
During the initial analyzes of the Medusae Fossae Formation, the research team could not rule out that it was just accumulations of blown dust, volcanic ash or sediment.
“This is where the new radar data comes into play,” explains co-author Andrea Cicchetti (National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy).
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“If the MFF were simply a giant pile of dust, given its depth, we would expect it to compact under its own weight.” This should create something denser than what is actually seen with Mars Express.
“When we modeled how different ice-free materials would behave, nothing reproduced the properties of the MFF – we need ice,” says Cicchetti.
The new research results show that dust still seems to play a role: There are layers of dust and ice in the depots, and everything is covered by a layer of dust several hundred meters thick.
The study was
published in the journal
Geophysical Research Letters .
Mars is said to have once had large amounts of water
This is not the first time that ice has been discovered on Mars.
Although the red planet is considered extremely dry and dusty, research suggests that there were once large amounts of water on its surface.
This is suggested, among other things, by dry canals, oceans, riverbeds and valleys created by water.
We also know that there is water ice on the polar ice caps of Mars.
The discovery of ice near the Martian equator raises new questions.
For example, the large ice deposits beneath the surface of the MFF could not have formed under the current Martian climate.
Esa scientist Colin Wilson formulates some of these questions: “How long ago did these ice deposits form, and what was Mars like at that time?
If confirmed to be water ice, these massive deposits would change our understanding of Mars' climate history.
Any reservoir of ancient water would be a fascinating target for exploration by humans or robots.”
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