Looking for martian ice
Past studies have shown that water ice lurks somewhere in the top dozen or so yards (10 meters) of martian soil. But beyond that, they couldn’t tell how deep the ice really is. And the exact depth of the ice makes a huge difference in how easy it will be for future astronauts to get to it for water. If it’s many yards deep, they’d need mining equipment. If it’s only a few inches, a simple shovel would do the trick.
A team of researchers led by Sylvain Piqueux of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found a way to deduce just how deep ice must be across the entire planet by monitoring the planet’s surface temperatures across the seasons.
Water ice is good at storing heat. In the summer, underground ice will tend to absorb extra heat from the ground above it, making the ground surface a bit cooler than it would have been without ice. In the winter, the ice releases some of that stored heat into its surroundings, making the ground surface a bit warmer. The more dramatic this effect, the closer to the planet’s surface the ice must be.
The researchers created a map of how deep ice is on the entire planet. They found that on large areas of Mars, ice is only a few inches below the surface.
“It’s just right there, you can scratch the surface and access it,” said Piqueux.
