Hidden Water in Mars’ Grand Canyon discovered by ExoMars Gas Orbiter

This is sort of an old piece of news and yet it is new to many! Water was found in the Valles Marineris (Grand Canyon) of Mars... Note that the Valles Marineris has some interesting statistics:

"The Valles Marineris is a system of canyons that runs along the Martian surface east of the Tharsis region. At more than 4,000 km long, 200 km wide and up to 7 km deep (4 mi), Valles Marineris is one of the largest canyons of the Solar System, surpassed in length only by the rift valleys of Earth." Wikipedia

Most researchers agree that Valles Marineris is a large tectonic "crack" in the Martian crust, forming as the planet cooled, affected by the rising crust in the Tharsis region to the west, and subsequently widened by erosional forces.

Here is the Video Description by iGadgetPro:

On December 15, 2021 ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (ESA) published scientific material to declare detection of significant amounts of water at the heart of Mars’ dramatic canyon system, Valles Marineris (Grand Canyon). The newly discovered volume of water is hiding under the surface of Mars, and was detected by the Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission in its first stage under the guidance of the ESA-Roscosmos project dubbed ExoMars. Gas Orbiter 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% of the near-surface material in this region appears to be water. Igor Mitrofanov, the Russian Academy of Science's lead investigator of the Space Research Institute, presented this discovery in the ESA press release.

Credit: esa.int, ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars

Source ESA press release: https://www.esa.int/Science_Explorati...

Source for ExoMars mission: https://www.esa.int/Science_Explorati...

Source for Perseverance’s image of Mars delta: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/26428...

I hope you found this as interesting as I did...
Kerry
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