ESA releases water map of Mars suggesting new landing locations for astronauts

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a new map of Mars which reveals the red planet’s mineral deposits resulting from its watery past. The agency says that this map would prove invaluable for future exploration as it would provide suitable landing locations for astronauts. Moreover, the aqueous minerals scattered around some of these locations would be extremely useful for science operations. 

What does the map reveal?

According to ESA, the map, which was created through spectral imaging by Europe’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, reveals regions that have aqueous minerals formed from rocks that were chemically altered by water. Most of the Martian rocks have now transformed into clay and salts and there are regions of such aqueous minerals in much higher numbers than previously thought. 

Scientists previously believed that there were no more than a thousand mineral outcrops on Mars but the map has uncovered hundreds of thousands of such regions in one of the oldest areas of Mars. 

“This work has now established that when you are studying the ancient terrains in detail, not seeing these minerals is actually the oddity,” John Carter, Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS), said in an official statement. 

Significance of the map

ESA says that the map has caused a paradigm shift in scientists’ understanding of the Martian past and it is clear now that water played a huge role in shaping the planet’s geology. After making these new discoveries, the experts are now trying to answer whether Mars had perennial water or it just saw shorter and more intense periods. 

“The evolution from lots of water to no water is not as clear cut as we thought, the water didn’t just stop overnight. We see a huge diversity of geological contexts so that no one process or simple timeline can explain the evolution of the mineralogy of Mars,” Carter said. “That’s the first result of our study. The second is that if you exclude life processes on Earth, Mars exhibits a diversity of mineralogy in geological settings just as Earth does”.

Further talking about the map's significance, the experts said that it provides candidate landing sites on Mars for reasons such as the presence of water molecule-bearing aqueous minerals. This could prove beneficial for the extraction of water and its usage on human bases. The second reason, as per ESA, is that they are perfect sites to investigate whether life once began on Mars.