Buried glaciers have been spotted on Mars, offering new hints about how much water may be accessible on the Red Planet and where it is located, researchers said Thursday.

Although ice has long been known to exist on Mars, a better understanding of its depth and location could be vital to future human explorers, said the report in the US journal Science.

"Astronauts could essentially just go there with a bucket and a shovel and get all the water they need," said co-author Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson.

A total of eight ice sites, some as shallow as a few feet (one meter) below the surface, and going as deep as 100 meters or more, have been exposed by erosion.

These underground cliffs, or scarps, appear "to be nearly pure ice," said the report.

The discovery was possible due to images and data sent by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), launched in 2005.

The probe's first find of water on Mars was published in Science in 2010.

- Widespread ice -

But now, scientists realize that ice is more widespread than previously thought, said lead author Colin Dundas, a geologist at the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona.

"There is shallow ground ice under roughly a third of the Martian surface, which records the recent history of Mars," he said.

"What we've seen here are cross-sections through the ice that give us a 3-D view with more detail than ever before."

The ice contains bands and color variations that suggest it was formed layer by layer, perhaps as snow accumulated over time, leading to ice sheets.

Researchers believe the ice formed relatively recently, because the sites appear smooth on the surface, unpocked by craters that would be formed by celestial debris smashing into the planet over time.

But just how and when they formed remains unclear.

The cliffs are located in the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars, at a latitude of 55 to 58 degrees, which on Earth would be similar to Scotland or the tip of South America.

These regions slip into a frigid darkness during the Martian winter and would not be a suitable site for a long-term human camp.

However, they are not as treacherous as the poles, and if a sample could be drilled from one of the glaciers, researchers could learn plenty about Mars' climate and the potential for life on Earth's neighboring planet.

"If you had a mission at one of these sites, sampling the layers going down the scarp, you could get a detailed climate history of Mars," said MRO deputy project scientist Leslie Tamppari of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"It's part of the whole story of what happens to water on Mars over time: Where does it go? When does ice accumulate? When does it recede?"

NASA plans to send the first human explorers to Mars by the 2030s.

souce: AFP

Astronomers have edged closer to solving the mystery of distant cosmic radio bursts according to a study Wednesday that offers insights into the blasts which emit more energy in a single millisecond than our sun does all day.

International astronomers have spotted a few dozen fast radio bursts (FRBs) -- and as many as 10,000 may occur daily -- but only one has repeated sporadically, known as FRB 121102, allowing it to be studied.

Researchers reported in the journal Nature that it appears to come from in an extreme environment, "among the most highly magnetized regions of space ever observed."

Similar environments are known to exist around massive black holes, but that may not be the only answer.

The radio bursts from FRB 121102 could also originate from a young neutron star inside a powerful nebula, or a supernova remnant, said the report.

"This is exotic. If we had one of these on the other side of our own galaxy -- the Milky Way -- it would disrupt radio here on Earth, and we'd notice, as it would saturate the signal levels on our smartphones," said Shami Chatterjee, senior research associate in astronomy at Cornell University.

"Whatever is happening there is scary. We would not want to be there."

These radio bursts were first discovered in 2007, so small even steps toward understanding their source offers big excitement for astronomers.

The source of FRB 121102 and its environment are unique, indicating "a new type of object not seen previously," said the report.

The huge pulse of radio waves -- more than 500 times greater any other fast radio burst observed to date -- come from three billion light years away and pass through a veil of magnetized plasma.

FRB 121102 was discovered in 2014 by Laura Spitler, a postdoctoral researcher who now works for the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

The mysterious burst lasted three one-thousandths of a second.

The latest data came from telescopes at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.

"It's remote sensing from three billion light years away," said James Cordes, professor of astronomy at Cornell University.
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"These new measurements allow us to be much more specific about the immediate surroundings of the source."

Source: AFP