Iceball Mars

Science : “The running joke is that somebody’s about to announce the discovery of water on Mars, again,” says planetary scientist Robert Grimm of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. Actually, it was more than 30 years ago that researchers first discovered water on Mars, more than a million cubic kilometers of it frozen in the north polar ice cap.Planetary scientists reported the latest water-ice findings at December’s American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, California. Jeffrey Plaut of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) team members reported detecting ice-rich deposits as deep as 1 kilometer beneath the 3-million-square-kilometer Dorsa Argentea Formation near the south polar cap.At this week’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Houston, Texas, Plaut and team members on SHARAD (SHAllow RADar)--the radar flying on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter--will report that ice is indeed abundant across the 1000-kilometer span of the Deuteronilus Mensae area on the edge of the great northern lowlands.