NASA scientists have found the perfect place to land on Mars

Mankind has long wanted to achievesurface of the Red Planet. But in order to do this one desire is not enough. In addition to obvious things, such as the availability of available technologies for this, a trained team of astronauts and so on, one of the main questions is: “Where, in fact, to fly?”. After all, Mars is rather big and for the first colonists you need to choose the perfect place for landing. And it seems that scientists from NASA recently found such a place.

It is possible that we now know where to send astronauts to Mars

Where to land a spaceship on Mars?

According to the editors of the Business Insider portal,NASA's team of experts discovered a vast area of ​​Mars, where ice is located almost on the surface of the planet. It can be an ideal place for astronauts to land, since any crew that lands on the Red Planet will have to extract resources there, and water is perhaps the most important of them.

It would be unbelievable to bring your water from Earthexpensive, says NASA paleontologist Sylvain Piquet, who led the study, in an interview with Business Insider. If you spend space on the ship for resources, then it simply will not remain for equipment. Therefore, it is important to get as much as possible on the planet.

On the other hand, it is known that under the surfacethe planet has ice. And planning a serious drilling operation within any space mission also requires special equipment, which means that additional fuel will be required to launch. In addition, digging on Mars is not easy, as the InSight lander thermal probe discovered when it started trying to do this earlier this year.

Read also: European Space Agency has begun the development of sleep technology for a flight to Mars

Mars has a lot of surface water ice ontheir poles. But these poles are not the best place to send astronauts, since they freeze and are shrouded in darkness for six months. NASA also does not want to land astronauts at a point near the equator of the planet, because there it is too warm for the existence of ice. Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a dense atmosphere to contain liquid water. When the ice gets too warm, the water simply evaporates.

The most important part of our work is that we found ice in the middle latitudes. We knew that there was potentially ice at these latitudes, but we also thought that it would be located much deeper.

Area with abundant (and at the same time relatively affordable) ice deposits

Scientists believe that this ice could have formed inthe result of an ancient snowfall, followed by a dust storm that quickly covered snow. This thin layer helped preserve frozen water for billions of years. Do you believe that humanity will reach the surface of Mars in the near future? Write your opinion in our chat in Telegram.

Now that NASA researchers have pinpointedAn area with abundant water resources, they can begin to explore potential landing sites in it. In the near future, experts will look for a more specific place that will be safe for people to land, and will also provide maximum opportunities for exploring the surface of Mars and organizing a colony of the first settlers.