Time to colonize! Water officially discovered on Mars!

Yesterday was a game changer in the search for life. Curiosity, that sexy rover exploring Gale crater in an equatorial region of Mars, confirmed that there is water all over the red planet.

Curiosity’s SAM (Surface Analysis on Mars) instrument suite took a detailed look at soil that Curiosity dug up back in October 2012, and after careful inspection, scientists found a surprising 2% of the soil’s weight was actually from water bound to minerals in the soil.

To put it into perspective, that’s about the equivilent of a bag of milk inside a bar mini-fridge filled with dirt, or 2 pints per cubic foot.

The SAM heated the collected soil up to over 800° C to see what compounds it was made up of. The gasses released not only showed water, but also a compound containing oxygen and chlorine (most likely ClO3 or ClO4) which was previously only found in the polar regions of Mars, locked away in polar ice (not the vodka). This discovery suggests that water is likely to be globaly distributed.

So what does this mean for us?

Water is obviously a precious necessity for life on Earth. Unfortunately due to the presence of chlorates in the waters of mars, it remains toxic to humans. Even at it’s current level of 0.5% saturation, it’s enough to seriously harm the human body if even exposed to the dirt its in. We have ways of removing the toxins, but this is a very intensive process. On the plus side, this is something we can currently do.

Water also weighs a lot. Since launching anything into orbit can be extremely expensive (around $2,500 per pound), the less we take with us, the better. Finding water on Mars and ice on Mercury, even if its locked away but still accessible, is a huge discovery and a promising development for future colonization endeavors.