Massive Subsurface Ice Deposits in Southern Hemisphere, MARSIS results - LPSC 2006 Options

[Guest_paulanderson_*]

Thanks to Doug for pointing out this LPSC update:

Mars Express: Probing the Depths
ftp://ftp.lpi.usra.edu/pub/outgoing/lpsc2006/full102.pdf

Another good article:

Martian Ice: Wide and Deep
http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1695_1.asp

"More recently, a shift in Mars Express's orbit has allowed MARSIS to probe the planet's south pole. There the buried ice extends down to 3½ kilometers (2 miles) under the cap in some places. Water ice appears quite transparent at radar wavelengths, and the ease with which MARSIS's signal penetrates the polar terrain suggests that the ice is relatively pure. "There's at most only a few percent of impurities," team coleader Jeffrey Plaut (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) told planetary scientists meeting in Houston this week.

Potentially more exciting is MARSIS's discovery that huge quantities of ice may underlie a large plain beyond the southern cap called Dorsa Argentea, which covers 3 million square kilometers, about 2% of the planet's surface. Geologists originally thought Dorsa Argentea was a volcanic plain, but James W. Head III (Brown University) and others recently realized that a broad ice sheet must lie beneath its dusty surface. Plaut reported that MARSIS has found multiple layers stacked beneath Dorsa Argentea to depths of up to 500 meters — and if they’re all ice, they represent a reservoir large enough to cover the entire planet with water to a depth of about 10 meters (30 feet)."

[CosmicRocker]

Astrobiology magazine has an informative interview with Jeff Plaut, the co-Principal investigator of the MARSIS radar instrument.