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 Riesige Wasserfläche auf dem Mars infographic
Grafik zeigt wo man das Wasser am Mars entdeckt hat.
GN42141DE

WELTRAUM

Satelliten finden einen Mars Canyon “voll Wasser”

By Ninian Carter

December 17, 2021 - Ein europäischer Mars Orbiter hat Wassereis im Herzen des Valles Marineris Canyon Systems entdeckt - ein Gebiet so groß wie die Niederlande.

Water ice may be lying just centimetres below the Martian surface at one of the planet’s most well known sites – the Valles Marineris, a huge 3,000 kilometre-long canyon system located along the equator of Mars.

Ten times longer and five times deeper than the Grand Canyon on Earth, the Valles Marineris is named after NASA’s Mariner 9 Mars orbiter which discovered it in 1971.

Now, 50 years later, the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has identified vast amounts of hydrogen in the soil’s upper surface layers at the centre of the canyon.

Alexey Malakhov, a senior scientist at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the nine authors a new paper on the subject, says “We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water — far more water than we expected. This is very much like Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures”.

Researchers added that if all of the hydrogen they have detected is present in the form of water ice, the compound could make up as much as 40% of near-surface material in the area.

Sources
PUBLISHED: 20/12/2021; STORY: Graphic News
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