Huge Water Ice Deposits At Mars Equator Has Discovered By ESA Orbiter

The European Space Agency – ESA orbiter has found enough water to cover Mars in an ocean between 4.9 and 8.9 feet (1.5 and 2.7 meters) deep, buried in the form of dusty ice beneath the planet's equator. This is an amazing discovery, which could improve future prospects for human Mars settlement.​

Approximately 15 years ago, Mars Express detected deposits beneath a geological formation called the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF), but scientists were not sure what those deposits consisted of. Mars' geography is split between northern highlands and southern lowlands, and the huge 5,000-km-long MMF is situated near the boundary between the two. It is suspected that the MMF itself formed within the past 3 billion years from lava flows and was covered in volcanic ash during an era long ago when Mars was volcanically active. Today, the MMF is covered in heaps of dust towering several kilometers high — it's actually the most plentiful source of dust on the entire planet, fuel for the giant dust storms that can engulf Mars on a seasonal basis. Were the deposits just dust, perhaps filling a deep valley? This perspective view shows Eumenides Dorsum, part of Mars's Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF). The MFF consists of a series of wind-sculpted deposits measuring hundreds of kilometers across and several kilometers high. Found at the boundary between Mars' highlands and lowlands, the deposits are possibly the biggest single source of dust on Mars, and one of the most extensive deposits on the planet. New observations by MARSIS, which is a subsurface radar on board Mars Express, now have the answer — and it's not dust. "Given how deep it is, if the MFF was simply a giant pile of dust, we'd expect it to become compacted under its own weight," said Andrea Cicchetti of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy in a press statement. "This would create something far denser than what we actually see with MARSIS." Instead, the deposits are low in density and fairly transparent to MARSIS' radar, which is exactly how one would expect water ice to appear in the data.