May 15 2008
From The Space Library
A team of researchers, led by Roger J. Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, announced in the online version of the journal Science that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) had gathered evidence indicating that Mars’s lithosphere is colder and thicker than scientists had previously thought. Using the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) on the MRO, the researchers had produced the most precise pictures to date of the Martian crust and upper mantle below the polar ice cap. The ice cap on Mars is 1.2 miles (1.93 kilometers) deep and 310,000 square miles (802,896.31 square kilometers) wide. On Earth, the force of a similar weight would cause the lithosphere to sag, but the Martian lithosphere remains level and even. The crust’s rigidity implies that the planet’s interior is colder than scientists had previously thought, indicating that any aquifers of liquid water that may exist on Mars would lie deeper below the surface, closer to the planet’s warm core. The radar pictures also showed that the crust is composed of layers of icy dust, interspersed with layers of almost pure ice. The researchers believed that vacillations in Mars’s orbit had caused the planet’s climate to change, resulting in these layers. ASI, the Italian space agency, had produced the SHARAD. NASA’s JPL managed MRO for NASA’s SMD.
NASA, “NASA Satellite Finds Interior of Mars Is Colder,” news release 08-128, 15 May 2008, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/may/HQ_08128_MRO_Mars_Temp.html (accessed 16 March 2011); Charles Q. Choi, “Brrr! Mars Colder Than Expected,” Space.com, 16 May 2008, http://www.space.com/5347-brrr-mars-colderexpected.html (accessed 16 March 2011); see also Roger J. Phillips, “Mars North Polar Deposits: Stratigraphy, Age, and Geodynamical,” Science 320, no. 5880 (30 May 2008): 1182-1185.
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