Mars Orbiter Spots Water in Mars’ Canyon System

• 17 Dec 2021

The Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter - a Mars orbiter launched in 2016 - has spotted water in Mars’ canyon system called the Valles Marineris.

• Mission: It is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
• Valles Marineris: It is the largest canyon system in the Solar System. It is about ten times longer and five times deeper than Earth’s Grand Canyon. A canyon refers to a deep valley with very steep sides.
• FREND Instrument: The water was spotted using the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO)’s Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument, which helps map hydrogen on the surface of Mars.

Perspective view of Candor Chasma (Image Source: ESA)

Key Highlights

• It showed that there was an unusual amount of hydrogen in the Candor Chaos, situated in the central region of the Valles Marineris.
• A little over 40 per cent of the near-surface material region appears to be water. The water-rich area is about the size of the Netherlands.
• It is similar to Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.

Significance

• Knowing more about how and where water exists on present-day Mars is essential to understand what happened to Mars’ once-abundant water, and helps our search for habitable environments, possible signs of past life, and organic materials from Mars’ earliest days.