Exposed Water ice Discovered Near the South Pole of Mars.

Details Exposed Water ice Discovered Near the South Pole of Mars. Exposed Water ice Discovered Near the South Pole of Mars.

Dec 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agufm.p72c..03t&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2002, abstract #P72C-03

Physics

1823 Frozen Ground, 5410 Composition, 5462 Polar Regions, 5470 Surface Materials And Properties, 6225 Mars

Scientific paper

Although near-surface H2O ice was expected from thermodynamic stability considerations, and recent GRS observations indicate abundant hydrogen in the near surface of the south polar region, the lack of exposed H2O ice, so obvious in the north polar region, had been puzzling. Initial examination of the Mars Odyssey Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) images, combined with Viking imaging and Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) temperatures, indicates there may be many such isolated areas of exposed H2O ice near the perennial CO2 cap. The exposed surface ice was first observed by THEMIS as a low albedo region whose temperature did not fit the expectations for CO2 or dry soil. The putative H2O ice region is a strip about 10km wide along the base of a slope below a CO2-covered plateau. Seasonal coverage is not yet available from THEMIS, but TES observations from the prior year indicate that after complete sublimation of the solid CO2, the temperature rises rapidly with little diurnal variation, versus a neighboring ``dry soil'' region where diurnal variations of ~20K developed. Thermal modeling of the ice region indicates a good fit to temperatures expected for a surface of thermal inertia ~2000, appropriate for solid H2O; there is no indication of a thin low-inertia covering layer. Visual Viking images from 25 years ago provide evidence that the boundary between the H2O ice region and the dry soil region has been stable over the last quarter century. An alternate explanation of these observations, that the region is a uniform, exposed solid rock, has shown to be implausible.

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