United States Space Agency (NASA) managed to find a source of water on the planet Mars is easily accessible. This discovery is expected to facilitate a robotic mission to Mars in the future, which can directly access the ice and tell all the required information.
Using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft, the United States government's independent agency for the civil space and aeronautical research program, received eight sites on exposed erosion cliffs containing a pile of pure ice, about three to six feet below the surface Red Planet.
According to the Science report, an academic journal released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science says the water source can be found on the north and south of the planet Mars, precisely at the latitude equivalent to South America and Scotland.
The 55-degree steep slope becomes the location of the area that contains the water source.
Researchers believe the site is newly formed, as there is no crater around the site's discovery site.
"Today we can see firsthand the thick underground ice sheet and this discovery is surprising," said one author from the University of Arizona, Shane Byrne, as reported by NASA.
The steep slope was discovered by measuring color using the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on MRO. While its purity was tested with Compact Reconnaissance Imaging (CRISM), a spectrophotometer for the Red Planet.
Previously in other locations on the planet Mars found a large sheet of ice using MRO's Shallow Radar. However, when found, the thickness of the ice sheet can not be known.
Thanks to the MRO, the researchers could measure the location and accessibility of the ice pile that was close enough and easily accessible.
Although there are concerns about the soil that does not contain much water, researchers do not consider it a big problem as long as the ice pile area is just below ground level. Of the eight sites found, about seven sites directly exposed ice water stacked.
"Basically, the antariksawan can go straight there with a bucket and shovel and get the water source they need," Shane continued.
Although this discovery is one of the most recent discoveries on the source of water on the Red Planet, it has not provided definite evidence for the existence of large ice blocks beneath the surface of the planet Mars.
Not only that, the content contained in the flow found is not yet known, so researchers have not been able to determine whether the source of water contains salt or it has a toxic compound.