Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Martian North Pole: Water So Pure You Could (Almost) Drink It?

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While it has been known that Mars's north pole contains an abundance of water, it looks as if some French scientists have discovered that water ice located up north may be much purer than we have originally thought.

(Physorg.com) Radar data sent back by the US Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) point to 95 percent purity in this deposit, France's National Institute of Sciences of the Universe (Insu) said in a press release.

The Martian polar regions are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometres" (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, it said.

Although its fairly obvious that the Martian water would still have to be heavily filtered, this high concentration of water ice does give the red planet some much needed real estate value.

If humanity is ever going to harvest the asteroid belt in the future, they are going to need an abundance of water for not only food and drink, but for fuel as well.




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1 comment:

  1. I always love some good news on the human space exploration topic. And this surely is some good news. If we can locate the deposits and easily harvest them it would make colonization much simpler and extremely cheaper. So thanks for the update!

    ReplyDelete

You can either visit the stars or watch them from afar.

But if you choose the former, you'll definitely get a better view.

~Darnell Clayton, 2007

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