KOSZONOM!

On 28 May 2002, LEONIDAK-l: Piriti Janos wrote:

> Donald Savage
> Headquarters, Washington            May 28, 2002
> (Phone: 202/358-1547)
>
> Mary Hardin
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
> (Phone: 818/354-0344)
>
> Heather Enos
> University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.
> (Phone: 520-621-8279)
>
> RELEASE: 02-99
>
> ODYSSEY FINDS WATER ICE IN ABUNDANCE UNDER MARS´ SURFACE
>
>       Using instruments on NASA´s 2001 Mars Odyssey
> spacecraft, surprised scientists have found enormous
> quantities of buried treasure lying just under the surface of
> Mars-enough water ice to fill Lake Michigan twice over. And
> that may just be the tip of the iceberg.
>
> "This is really amazing. This is the best direct evidence we
> have of subsurface water ice on Mars. We were hopeful that we
> could find evidence of ice, but what we have found is much
> more ice than we ever expected," said William Boynton,
> principal investigator for Odyssey´s gamma ray spectrometer
> suite at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
>
> Scientists used Odyssey´s gamma ray spectrometer instrument
> suite to detect hydrogen, which indicated the presence of
> water ice in the upper meter (three feet) of soil in a large
> region surrounding the planet´s south pole. "It may be better
> to characterize this layer as dirty ice rather than as dirt
> containing ice," added Boynton. The detection of hydrogen is
> based both on the intensity of gamma rays emitted by
> hydrogen, and by the intensity of neutrons that are affected
> by hydrogen. The spacecraft´s high-energy neutron detector
> and the neutron spectrometer observed the neutron intensity.
>
> The amount of hydrogen detected indicates 20 to 50 percent
> ice by mass in the lower layer. Because rock has a greater
> density than ice, this amount is more than 50 percent water
> ice by volume. This means that if one heated a full bucket of
> this ice-rich polar soil it would result in more than half a
> bucket of water.
>
> The gamma ray spectrometer suite is unique in that it senses
> the composition below the surface to a depth as great as one
> meter. By combining the different type of data from the
> instrument, the team has concluded the hydrogen is not
> distributed uniformly over the upper meter but is much more
> concentrated in a lower layer beneath the top-most surface.
>
> The team also found that the hydrogen-rich regions are
> located in areas that are known to be very cold and where ice
> should be stable. This relationship between high hydrogen
> content with regions of predicted ice stability led the team
> to conclude that the hydrogen is, in fact, in the form of
> ice. The ice-rich layer is about 60 centimeters (two feet)
> beneath the surface at 60 degrees south latitude, and gets to
> within about 30 centimeters (one foot) of the surface at 75
> degrees south latitude.
>
> "Mars has surprised us again. The early results from the
> gamma ray spectrometer team are better than we ever
> expected," said R. Stephen Saunders, Odyssey´s project
> scientist at NASA´s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),
> Pasadena, Calif. "In a few months, as we get into Martian
> summer in the northern hemisphere, it will be exciting to see
> what lies beneath the cover of carbon dioxide dry-ice as it
> disappears."
>
> "The signature of buried hydrogen seen in the south polar
> area is also seen in the north, but not in the areas close to
> the pole. This is because the seasonal carbon dioxide (dry
> ice) frost covers the polar areas in winter. As northern
> spring approaches, the latest neutron data indicate that the
> frost is receding, revealing hydrogen-rich soil below," said
> William Feldman, principal investigator for the neutron
> spectrometer at Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico.
>
> "We have suspected for some time that Mars once had large
> amounts of water near the surface. The big questions we are
> trying to answer are, ´where did all that water go?´ and
> ´what are the implications for life?´ Measuring and mapping
> the icy soils in the polar regions of Mars as the Odyssey
> team has done is an important piece of this puzzle, but we
> need to continue searching, perhaps much deeper underground,
> for what happened to the rest of the water we think Mars once
> had," said Jim Garvin, Mars Program Scientist, NASA
> Headquarters, Washington.
>
> Another new result from the neutron data is that large areas
> of Mars at low to middle latitudes contain slightly enhanced
> amounts of hydrogen, equivalent to several percent water by
> mass. Interpretation of this finding is ongoing, but the
> team´s preliminary hypothesis is that this relatively small
> amount of hydrogen is more likely to be chemically bound to
> the minerals in the soil, than to be in the form of water
> ice.
>
> JPL manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA´s Office
> of Space Science, Washington. Investigators at Arizona State
> University, Tempe, the University of Arizona, Tucson, and
> NASA´s Johnson Space Center, Houston, operate the science
> instruments. The gamma-ray spectrometer was provided by the
> University of Arizona in collaboration with the Russian
> Aviation and Space Agency, which provided the high-energy
> neutron detector, and the Los Alamos National Laboratories,
> New Mexico, which provided the neutron spectrometer. Lockheed
> Martin Astronautics, Denver, developed and built the orbiter.
> Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin
> and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of
> Technology in Pasadena.
>
> Additional information about the 2001 Mars Odyssey and the
> gamma-ray spectrometer is available at /is available on the
> Internet at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/ and
>  http://grs.lpl.arizona.edu.
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