The European Space Agency (ESA) recently mentioned in a press release that “significant amounts of water” has been found on Mars’ s Valles Marineris, the grand canyon system. The discovery was made while investigating whether the red planet entailed life or not. 

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The water was discovered by the Trace Gas Orbiter and was found to be hidden under the Martian surface. The orbiter is the first stage of mission ExoMars, the joint initiative of ESA-Roscosmos. The Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) of the orbiter was able to map the hydrogen content of the Martian soil, giving way to the discovery. High energy cosmic rays, when met with soil, enables the latter to emit neutrons. This mechanism allows scientists to get a fair idea about the water content that lies below the surface of the soil. 

“FREND revealed an area with an unusually large amount of hydrogen in the colossal Valles Marineris canyon system: assuming the hydrogen we see is bound into water molecules, as much as 40 percent of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water,” said lead investigator Igor Mitrofanov of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the press release.

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Although water has been previously discovered on Mars, it has only been found in concentrated amounts near the poles. A very small amount of water has been found on the lower latitudes. A greater discovery in the lower latitudes would allow room for more explorations by the scientists. Discovery of water in Valles Marineris is a great step in the same direction.

 A tweet from the ExoMars mission notes, “the reservoir is large, not too deep below ground, and could be easily exploitable for future explorers.” 

However, the discovery still has a long way to go. A study conducted by the journal “Icarus” highlights that mere discovery of neutrons doesn’t tell about the nature of water. It may be in the form of water molecules in soil or ice, and/or a mixture of both. 

“We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water–far more water than we expected,” said study co-author Alexey Malakhov in a release. “This is very much like Earth’s permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.”