Science:
"The running joke is that somebody's about to announce the
discovery of water on Mars, again," says planetary scientist
Robert Grimm of
the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder,
Colorado. Actually, it was more than 30 years ago that
researchers first discovered water on Mars, more than a million
cubic kilometers of it frozen in the north polar ice
cap.Planetary scientists reported the latest water-ice findings
at December's American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San
Francisco, California. Jeffrey Plaut of the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and Mars Advanced
Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) team
members reported detecting ice-rich deposits as deep as 1
kilometer beneath the 3-million-square-kilometer Dorsa Argentea
Formation near the south polar cap.At this week's Lunar and
Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Houston, Texas, Plaut
and team members on SHARAD (SHAllow RADar)--the radar flying on
NASA's
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter--will report that ice is
indeed abundant across the 1000-kilometer span of the
Deuteronilus Mensae area on the edge of the great northern
lowlands.
