Scientists have discovered a large reservoir of water hidden within Mars’ gigantic ‘Grand Canyon.’

A group of scientists using the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Orbiter identified a significant deposit of water immediately beneath the Valles Marineris Martian canyon system, which is ten times longer and five times deeper than our own Grand Canyon.

The scientists discovered genuine water ice around three feet below the canyon’s surface after analysing data from the Trace Gas Orbiter’s (TGO) Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND).

Particularly if Mars possesses the huge expanses of water that the Earth does, the presence of water on Mars could point to the existence of microbial extraterrestrial life as well as the potential for more complex life forms.

Igor Mitrofanov, the lead author from the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in a release, “With TGO we can peer down to one meter below this dusty layer and discover what’s truly going on underneath Mars’ surface.

In the massive Valles Marineris canyon system, FREND “discovered an area with an exceptionally significant amount of hydrogen: assuming the hydrogen we detect is bound into water molecules, as much as 40% of the near-surface material in this region looks to be water,” he continued.

There is lots of room to perhaps discover more water in the vast area, which is roughly the same size as the Netherlands. Coauthor Alexey Malakhov noted, “We found a core area of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water – significantly more water than we expected. This is extremely similar to the permafrost regions on Earth, where water ice persistently forms beneath dry soil due to the persistently low temperatures.

Overall, we believe that this water is more likely to exist as ice, according to Malakhov.

The discovery is being hailed by scientists as a significant first step toward maybe discovering evidence of prehistoric life on the Red Planet or even potential locations that we ourselves may one day inhabit.

Reference(s): Icarus