REAL LIFE NEWS: HUGE FROZEN UNDERGROUND LAKE FOUND ON MARS
by Hazed
There’s plenty of water on Mars which future colonists should be able to access, NASA scientists say. They’ve discovered a huge deposit of water ice just under the surface.
The frozen underground lake has been found in a large depression in the northern hemisphere, called the Utopia Planitia. It was formed by a massive impact early in the planet’s history. The patch of ice is roughly the size of New Mexico, and it contains enough water to fill Lake Superior.
“This deposit is probably more accessible than most water ice on Mars, because it is at a relatively low latitude and it lies in a flat, smooth area where landing a spacecraft would be easier than at some of the other areas with buried ice,” Jack Holt of the University of Texas, coauthor of the Utopia paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, said.
Water on Mars evaporates quickly on the surface, but this ice deposit is protected by a layer of soil between 3 to 33 feet thick, making it shallow enough for easy mining. That’s one less thing potential colonists will have to worry about.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/22/nasa_finds_ice_under_martian_surface/
