A radar finds great Mars glaciers
The track of the Mars water, that many scientists follow hard, brings to light this week two important findings. On the one hand, scientists affirm to have found what probably they are great glaciers hidden under a thin layer of stones and earth. They have done the exploration with a radar of a ship in orbit of Mars and concentrating in average latitudes of the planet, which confers special relevance to the finding, since the water existence in polar zones is well-known.
The other discovery talks about there to the existence of the great ocean in the past: a sea as large as 20 Mediterranean ones could cover great part with the red planet does a few thousands of million years, judging by the identified coastlines thanks to special the chemical composition of rocks. Both findings are independent, have taken control of different sensors, embarked in different ships in orbit from Mars.
Indications of ice deposits had already announced in low latitudes of Mars and determined geologic characteristics similar to Antarctic glaciers they had drawn attention of the specialists a long time ago. Now, John W. Holt (University of Texas) and their colleagues, who had optimized their radar of the sounding of the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to look for those almost equatorial glaciers, announce in the Science magazine has detected that them. The ice seems to extendender tens of kilometers from mountainous edges and old cliffs; it can have a thickness of until about 800 meters and would have survived from the last age of the Martian ice, makes million years.
Taken altogether, these glaciers represent, almost surely, the greater water reserve frozen in Mars outside the polar caps , says Holt. One of these glaciers is three times greater than the city of Los Angeles and is others; besides its scientific value, they can be a water source for the future Mars exploration , adds.
These glaciers must contain small amounts of dust or rock, like the deposits that the European sounding Mars Express in polar Mars regions found with its own radar, emphasize the scientists. This European radar obtains more penetration but less superficial detail than the one of the MRO.
The other group, with participation of the CSIC, has analyzed with spectrometer gamma a ray of the ship Mars Odyssey, the composition of peculiar a Mars formation that could be coastal South Sea islanders. The concentration of iron, potassium and thorium delimits two possible coastlines: one of the greater ocean, of up to 20 times the extension of the Mediterranean, that would cover a third with Mars, and more recent other, of a sea like 10 Mediterranean ones, that would be the surplus of first when it went away evaporating. The study presented/displayed in a special number of Planetary and Space Science.
Source: www.elpais.com
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