But far too deep to tap. Geophysicists have found evidence for a large underground reservoir of liquid water — enough to fill oceans on the planet’s surface.
The data from NASA’s Insight lander allowed the scientists to estimate that the amount of groundwater could cover the entire planet to a depth of between 1 and 2 kilometers, or about a mile.
While that’s good news for those tracking the fate of water on the planet after its oceans disappeared more than 3 billion years ago, the reservoir won’t be of much use to anyone trying to tap into it to supply a future Mars colony. It’s located in tiny cracks and pores in rock in the middle of the Martian crust, between 11.5 and 20 kilometers (7 to 13 miles) below the surface. Even on Earth, drilling that deep would be a challenge.
The finding does pinpoint another promising place to look for life on Mars, however, if the reservoir can be accessed. For the moment, it helps answer questions about the geological history of the planet.
Evidence of river channels, deltas and lake deposits, as well as water-altered rock — supports the hypothesis that water once flowed on the planet’s surface. But that wet period ended more than 3 billion years ago, after Mars lost its atmosphere. Planetary scientists on Earth have sent many probes and landers to the planet to find out what happened to that water — the water frozen in Mars’ polar ice caps can’t account for it all — as well as when it happened, and whether life exists or used to exist on the planet.
The new findings are an indication that much of the water did not escape into space but filtered down into the crust.
The Insight lander was sent by NASA to Mars in 2018 to investigate the crust, mantle, core and atmosphere, and it recorded invaluable information about Mars’ interior before the mission ended in 2022. Insight detected Mars quakes up to about a magnitude of 5, meteor impacts and rumblings from volcanic areas, all of which produced seismic waves that allowed geophysicists to probe the interior.
©James Tuttle Keane and Aaron Rodriquez, courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography
The data from NASA’s Insight lander allowed the scientists to estimate that the amount of groundwater could cover the entire planet to a depth of between 1 and 2 kilometers, or about a mile.
While that’s good news for those tracking the fate of water on the planet after its oceans disappeared more than 3 billion years ago, the reservoir won’t be of much use to anyone trying to tap into it to supply a future Mars colony. It’s located in tiny cracks and pores in rock in the middle of the Martian crust, between 11.5 and 20 kilometers (7 to 13 miles) below the surface. Even on Earth, drilling that deep would be a challenge.
The finding does pinpoint another promising place to look for life on Mars, however, if the reservoir can be accessed. For the moment, it helps answer questions about the geological history of the planet.
Evidence of river channels, deltas and lake deposits, as well as water-altered rock — supports the hypothesis that water once flowed on the planet’s surface. But that wet period ended more than 3 billion years ago, after Mars lost its atmosphere. Planetary scientists on Earth have sent many probes and landers to the planet to find out what happened to that water — the water frozen in Mars’ polar ice caps can’t account for it all — as well as when it happened, and whether life exists or used to exist on the planet.
The new findings are an indication that much of the water did not escape into space but filtered down into the crust.
The Insight lander was sent by NASA to Mars in 2018 to investigate the crust, mantle, core and atmosphere, and it recorded invaluable information about Mars’ interior before the mission ended in 2022. Insight detected Mars quakes up to about a magnitude of 5, meteor impacts and rumblings from volcanic areas, all of which produced seismic waves that allowed geophysicists to probe the interior.
©James Tuttle Keane and Aaron Rodriquez, courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography
