William Atkins
Friday, 21 November 2008 01:56
Science -
Space
Page 2 of 3
The radar instruments aboard
MRO have also found what the same underground water-ice glaciers at locations in the northern hemisphere.
In fact, U.S. geologist Jeffrey J. Plaut (with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California) states,
“There's an even larger volume of water ice in the northern deposits. The fact these features are in the same latitude bands, about 35 to 60 degrees in both hemispheres, points to a climate-driven mechanism for explaining how they got there."
Plaut will be soon publishing his parallel studies about this team’s discovery in the northern hemisphere of Mars within the journal
Geophysical Research Letters (of the American Geophysical Union).
The discovery of water ice at these middle latitudes on Mars helps to explain a mystery that has perplexed scientists since the 1970s. At that time, NASA’s series of
Viking orbiting spacecraft observed gently sloping landmasses that contained rocky deposits at the bases of taller geographic masses.
The scientists weren’t really sure how these aprons, as the researchers called these mildly elevating masses, came to be present on the planet.
However, now scientists are quite sure that these aprons are the tops of deeper buried masses that are composed of large amounts of water ice.
The MRO-based radio waves that went into the ground at these locations bounced back to the spacecraft to produce a resulting speed that is consistent with underground water ice. The speed is faster than if the radar waves would have encountered a rocky mass underneath the surface.
Page three talks about the past on Mars, and its future, all with respect to knowledge that we may soon receive based on these discoveries.
